Press jumps out of the tank for Obama?

Noam Scheiber, TNR:

I didn't realize how beleaguered Barack Obama looked at his now-infamous Texas press conference until I flipped through some photos I'd taken. In the first, Obama wears a pleading expression and extends both arms forward. In the second, Obama's jaw is clenched and his eyes have retreated behind prominent bags. By the third, his eyes are closed and his lips are pursed--the face of a man about to explain something for the seventh time.

If the photos were drawings in a comic book, they might be accompanied by words like "Wap!" "Pow!" and "Kaboom!" Reporters jumped on Obama for his ties to Tony Rezko, the indicted Chicago real estate tycoon. They badgered him about reports that an adviser had disavowed his NAFTA stance to Canadian officials. The battering didn't even let up once Obama fled the podium. "That's the first time I've seen a press conference where he walked away from the mic and everyone was still asking questions," says one Obama beat reporter.

For the rest of the day, the cable networks breathlessly played clip after clip from the encounter. Wolf Blitzer suggested Obama was suddenly coming in for "sharper scrutiny" after "what some say was essentially a free ride." A Washington Post headline the next morning blared: ASK TOUGH QUESTIONS? YES, THEY CAN!

Is the press love affair with Obama really over? It might be--if only the relationship had ever been so simple.

There's no question that the tone of the Obama coverage shifted in the week or two before the March 4 primaries. This is something you would have noticed if, say, you happened to be one of the two dozen Americans who still rely on the nightly network broadcasts for political news. As the Post's Howard Kurtz has pointed out, the networks were unusually focused on Obama's ties to Rezko, his nearly 130 "present" votes in the Illinois Senate, and his close relationship with an Illinois energy company. This is not altogether a bad thing. "You had reporters who are sober-minded coming back from these [events] besotted, enthralled," says an editor involved in Obama coverage. "To the point that you were becoming concerned about, you know--do they feel like it's necessary for this guy to get nominated?"

Still, tone is hardly the same as substance. The same news outlets who have put up with slobbering correspondents have sicced investigative teams on Obama's biography for the better part of a year. "Everyone's been looking for a way in," says this editor. "It's just been thin gruel beyond a certain point."

...

Part of it was the Chicago media doing its job and not acting like a bunch of homers. Part of it was Saturday Night live shaming the rest of the media into doing its job.The Boston Globe and the NY Times are starting to look closer at this stance on the war and find a pattern of following the polls more than principal. It is something Bill Clinton noted in his speech about Obama's war position weeks ago when the media was not yet ready to get out of its swoon. They may have come out of it too late for Hillary. Whether McCain can take advantage of it is another question.

There is much more in Scheiber's piece.