The Mainstream Media Conjured President Obama’s ‘Worst Year Ever’

Who could have predicted that the perfect mainstream media narrative, that 2013 was the “worst year” of President Barack Obama‘s presidency, would arrive under the media’s Christmas tree in such a perfectly gift-wrapped box? The confluence of events that led to that assessment were so perfectly constructed, you’d have thought they planned it all themselves. As it turns out, it looks a lot like they did.

This irresistible narrative seemed to spring up organically at President Obama’s end-of-year press conference, the result of a sober assessment by completely objective journalists. “When you look back at this year, very little of what you outlined has been achieved, and your ratings from the public are near historic lows for you,” Associated Press reporter Julie Pace said, and asked “Has his been the worst year of your presidency?”

The same media that gets to decide if this was the worst year of Obama’s presidency, however, also had a hand in shaping that year, and before this year even began, they telegraphed their intention to put their collective thumb on the scale to make that worst year happen. The votes from the 2012 election were barely counted before CNN, among others, began speculating about a scandal-plagued second term for the President. That talk dominated the holiday news dead zone, fueled by the now-forgotten David Petraeus scandal. By itself, this would just be another Beltway media time-killer, but it didn’t stop there.

As 2013 rolled around, evidence began to emerge that the mainstream media was looking for ways to fulfill that prophecy. In January, ABC News’ Nightline joked that “Already days into his new term, Barack Obama has his first scandal: Beyoncé,” a reference to the pop superstar’s lip-synced performance at the Super Bowl. That joke wasn’t just revealing of the media’s scandal-hunting mindset, it was foreshadowing. Within months, the media would try to concoct a White House scandal around Beyoncé’s trip to Cuba with husband Jay-Z.

Later in January, the mainstream media chased the right-wing blogosphere’s tail for over a week trying to decide if President Obama was a big fat liar when he said he enjoys skeet-shooting. The Washington Post ran a series of “fact-checks” so deranged, even Orly Taitz had to look away. In February, mainstream media golden calf Bob Woodward ignited weeks of outrage with his accusation that someone at the White House “threatened” him, and even though the story turned out to be complete bullshit, the media held fast to the narrative it created.

Concurrent to all of this scandal spaghetti-throwing, the mainstream press was also busy preemptively dooming President Obama’s attempts to push for gun regulation, which in turn helped to provide cover for Republicans, who ignored overwhelming public support to block it.

Then, after months of unsuccessful attempts to get the scandal lawnmower to turn over, came the weekend of May 10, and the birth of the three-headed Scandalabra™. In rapid succession, mainstream news organizations broke stories about an IRS scandal, a scandal involving the Justice Department’s investigation of Associated Press reporters, and new revelations that aided the ongoing Republican effort to turn the tragedy of Benghazi into a political scandal. There were legitimate news angles to all of these stories, but the coverage of each was uniformly deranged, deceptive, and inaccurate.

The IRS scandal involved the alleged targeting of tea party groups for extra scrutiny of their applications for tax-exempt status, and while Lois Lerner’s apology at the time made it hard to know that the whole thing was bunk, mainstream reporters immediately leapt to the conclusion that President Obama directed the “abuse of power,” with absolutely no evidence to support it. ABC News’ Terry Moran just came right out and made the accusation, but every news organization featured the implication with constant comparisons to the Richard Nixon administration. When it finally emerged that the IRS had also targeted progressive groups, there was little in the way of retraction.

The Associated Press investigation was a serious cause for debate, but instead of covering the Justice Department’s seizure of phone records responsibly, scores of mainstream media figures falsely claimed there was “eavesdropping” or “tapping” involved, a panicky pattern that would continue into other stories. The leaker in that investigation has since plead guilty.

The reemergence of the Benghazi “scandal” was spurred by “emails” that were “obtained” by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, emails which later turned out to not be emails that were not obtained by Karl at all. Two of the most respected names in journalism, CNN’s Jake Tapper and CBS News’ Major Garrett, clearly called out the importance of this “invented” evidence to advancing the story, but beyond that, there were no consequences, and no retractions from Karl and CBS News’ Sharyl Attisson.

Then, in early June came the first revelations by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, which were of unquestionable news value, but which were routinely falsified and exaggerated by the mainstream media, and which led them to pin the entirety of the post-FISA, post-9/11 security state on a president who had, only weeks earlier, given a speech in which he had called for a reining in of that very security state.

The list goes on, but the cherry on the mainstream media’s 2013 Worst Year sundae was Obamacare. The rollout of the website was legitimately a disaster, but in the blizzard of Obamacare coverage since then, people may have forgotten that the mainstream media pretty much missed that story because it was too busy walking the government shutdown story to chew that gum. Once the shutdown had ended, though, the media announced its intention to get caught up, and then some.

The breadth and depth of the website’s problems are such that it is difficult to argue with the amount of coverage they received, but when glitches could no longer sustain the news cycle by themselves, every major media outlet began a campaign of false, misleading, and completely fabricated reporting on supposed Obamacare horror stories, people who were losing their old health insurance, and being forced to pay more, or go without. Most of these people, it turned out, would actually be paying less under Obamacare, and be getting better coverage, but only one of dozens of these stories was ever corrected, and that one was by The Heritage Foundation, not a news organization.

If these stories had been reported correctly, they would have provided a powerful counter-balance to the website’s woes, and would have largely neutralized the next phase of Obamacare “outrage,” the “scoop” that not all pre-Obamacare insurance plans would wind up being grandfathered when the law went into effect. Would this have morphed into the “Lie of the Year” if the media had correctly reported that these alleged Obamacare “victims” actually had little reason to like the insurance they were losing?

Media critics on both sides of the political spectrum are far too concerned with the idea of partisan “bias,” when they really ought to be worrying more about fundamentals like accuracy, and maybe fairness, if you’ve got time. The media’s creation of Obama’s “Worst Year Ever” may or may not have something to do with the former, but it has everything to do with the latter.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.