Via Digby comes Eric Boehlert: Covering new presidents: the media’s double standard:
In anticipation of the new administration, Beltway media insiders are busy laying the groundwork for how reporters and pundits will treat the new team on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Once a president takes office … an adversarial relationship usually flourishes, at least with beat reporters,” wrote Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. And former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, discussing the press corps on Fox News, agreed: “They are inevitably going to turn on him, as all — this happened to every administration. I don’t see why we should be surprised. It is the natural turn of events.”
The conventional wisdom is quite clear: The press always turns skeptical and becomes combative when new presidents come to town.
Except, of course, when the press does not. (…)
At the outset of the Bush presidency, when it became obvious that the press had adopted a softer standard for judging the new Republican president, author Jeffrey Toobin noted that “the high emotional temperature of the Clinton years left a lot of people, including journalists, kind of exhausted.” He added, “I think it will probably take a while to sort of gin that back up again.”
Over the course of eight years of covering Bush, I’m not sure the press ever recaptured the fever it displayed during the Clinton years. So it would be deeply suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn up that emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic administration.
It would also be troubling for journalism if the press responded to conservative claims today that reporters had been too soft on the Democrat during the campaign by reacting the same way journalists did when those claims were lodged during the 1992 campaign: by trashing the victorious Democrat to prove the press corps wasn’t “in the tank.” [more]
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