A year into his presidency, President Obama faces a polarized nation and souring public assessments of his efforts to change Washington, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Nearly half of all Americans say Obama is not delivering on his major campaign promises, and a narrow majority have just some or no confidence that he will make the right decisions for the country's future.
By the way, this was the Post's headline:
Poll shows growing disappointment, polarization over Obama's performance
According to the Post, there was "growing disappointment" over Obama. Yet the Post itself forgot to report that his approval rating had gone up that month.
The same was true over at CNN.com in December 2009. Writing up the results of its latest poll, CNN not only didn't think the news hook was that Obama's approval rating had gone up 6 points in just two weeks, but the CNN article didn't even reference that finding until two-thirds of the way into the piece.
And then there was the AP in November 2009. Same drill. Its polling at the time showed Obama enjoying a robust 54 percent approval rating. So where was that information buried? In the article's ninth paragraph, after the AP painted an almost comically bleak picture of the political landscape Obama faced at the time.
And again, it's not just that the press has often misstated the facts about Obama's polling numbers. It's that this is the same Beltway press corps that often treated Obama's Republican predecessor in the exact opposite way, often itching to suggest that Bush's horrendous polling numbers were on the mend and spending years denying Bush's glaring job approval ratings collapse.
For instance, in January 2006, Time magazine's Mike Allen announced that Bush had "found his voice" and that relieved White House aides "were smiling again" after a rocky 2005. Of course, within months, Bush's approval rating fell to new all-time lows.
In April of that year, Katie Couric, then with NBC News, was asking Tim Russert if the White House could "breath[e] a sigh of relief" because Bush's latest approval rating had only fallen to 36 percent. In the end, Bush's phantom rebound never materialized and he left office as the least popular president in modern American history.
And yet for most of his eight years in office, the press seemed to have a gut feeling that Americans just liked Bush. And today, their instinct tells them that Americans don't really approve of Obama.
Here's an idea: Maybe journalists should simply report what Americans tell pollsters and stop trying to concoct a storyline.(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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