While the majority of the media is busy explaining , excusing or defending Barack Obama's broken campaign promises, bad proposals and socialistic tendencies, Fox News has taken the position of calling him out publicly and challenging him.
In the short time since Glenn Beck left CNN to host his show on Fox News Channel, his ratings have soared. Much of the success is directly related to the fact that he challenges the Obama administration and that theme is being described as striking "ratings gold."
From the LA Times:
Beck's indignant critiques of the Obama administration and gloomy outlook on the nation's financial health have found near-instant resonance. His eponymous 2 p.m. PST program averaged nearly 2.2 million viewers last month -- double the number the time slot attracted the previous February and a remarkable amount for the afternoon. That made "Glenn Beck" the third most-watched program in all of cable news for the month, after Bill O'Reilly's and Sean Hannity's evening shows.
"I look at the ratings every day shocked," Beck said on a recent afternoon, sitting shoeless in his Midtown office as snow pelted the Manhattan skyline behind him.
But he believes he knows why viewers are tuning in: "People know in their gut that something's not right. They're not getting the truth."
A similar challenging tone can be heard across Fox News, which has embraced its role as an opposition voice to the new administration. The network's pundits have incredulously questioned President Obama's fiscal policies, while its correspondents have dogged stories like the White House plan to oversee the 2010 census.
"I think we've been doing a very good job of trying to point out some things that maybe some other news organizations haven't pointed out," said Bill Shine, the network's senior vice president of programming. "We're kind of looking for things that people aren't being told."
The network's tenor has not gone unnoticed.
"I think it's fair to say that I don't always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that's part of how democracy is supposed to work," Obama told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace last month.
The approach has paid off in the ratings. After CNN scored key victories with its election coverage last year, Fox News has now regained its wide lead. In February, the cable channel enjoyed a 29% overall spike in viewership and ranked third among all basic cable channels in prime time.
The excessive media worship helped Obama win the presidential election, but once in office and officially the President of the U.S. people expect the media to give them the news, tell them what they need to know and not spend their time excusing bad decisions and defending mistakes.
The DC Examiner says Obama's day of reckoning has arrived and declares "Obama is in trouble," in their headline.
Did you feel it? The political ground shifting beneath President Barack Obama since his speech last week to Congress? It's been downhill since and I'm not referring mainly to the Dow Jones record-setting dive. The pivot point of the shift was the speech, or rather what the speech did to the evolving public narrative of Obama.
Also in that article, Tapper explains the shift and why people are now starting to "see" Obama in a different light:
Now, though, the mask is off and the disconnect between rhetoric and reality is emerging as the dominant driver of the Obama narrative. The contrast is no longer between the young, personable, historic candidate Obama and a creaky, cranky old Republican White Guy, it's between what America thought it was getting in a President Obama (cool, reasonable and beyond partisanship) and what it now sees as the reality of a President Obama (government spending out of control, an uncertain hand on foreign policy, broken promises, more bureaucrats, etc. etc.).
Put another way - what we see now is neither what we were promised, nor what we expected.
In Forbes, an article points out how three other journalists have come to see Barack Obama for what he is, which is neither a moderate or a centrist, instead of what he campaigned claiming he was.
Congratulations this week to three journalists who have finally taken up that constant struggle: Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks. All three used to insist that Obama was some species of centrist or moderate. Now that Obama has proposed the most massive expansion of government in the history of the republic, each has recognized that just conceivably he might have been mistaken.
A humorist--and, I should disclose, an old friend--Christopher Buckley exercised his acute comic sense during the presidential campaign, judging John McCain so thoroughly risible that the nation could hardly do worse by electing Barack Obama. Now Buckley has developed a sense of the tragic. In electing Obama, he admits, we may indeed have done worse--a lot worse.
"The strange thing," Buckley wrote last week after listening to Obama address Congress, "is that one feels almost unpatriotic, entertaining negative thoughts about Mr. Obama's grand plan. ... One thing is certain, however: Government is getting bigger and will stay bigger. Just remember ... that a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away."
Perhaps media journalists are finally starting to wake up. Too late for the next four years, but in time to highlight the disaster that Barack Obama is and fix the mistake in 2012.
You can see Glenn Beck's shows at his Fox News page.
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