The Frame is the Game

An article by Robert Parry exposes how the right wing news media is creating a negative frame for the Obama administration which is then picked up and disseminated by the main stream media. The complete article is a must read, "Framing Obama -- by the WPost."

The following is an excerpt:

As Barack Obama reaches the two-month anniversary of his presidency, he is facing such a problem from the powerful Washington Post, which is creating a negative “frame” for his administration.

The Post’s news pages have been filled with supposedly objective news stories that have portrayed Republican obstructionism not as the GOP’s determination to hobble Obama – much as the Republicans did to Bill Clinton in 1993-94 – but as Obama’s “failure” to achieve the bipartisanship he advocated during the campaign.

The Post and other leading news organizations also have suffered from a strange amnesia about the fact that today’s worldwide financial disaster has been in the making for many years and reached a crisis point in 2008 under the “self-regulatory” theories of President George W. Bush.

Instead of that context, the recession is portrayed as an Obama problem, with the Post and other news outlets even forgetting to mention in stories about the 6.2 percent drop in the gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2008 that the startling decline occurred under Bush, not Obama.

The Washington Post pulled those two peculiar threads together in a March 14 page-one article entitled “Obama’s New Tack: Blaming Bush,” which claims that Obama is violating his pledge of bipartisanship by alleging that the economic crisis predated his presidency. The story’s sub-head reads: “President Points to ‘Inherited’ Economy.”[...]

Once that frame is created, the conclusion becomes obvious: Obama is a liar for talking about bipartisanship during Campaign 2008 and at his Inauguration, while now trying to excuse his own failure to resolve the economic crisis by unfairly shifting blame to Bush and the Republicans, who are the victims.[...]

The significance of how the Post frames the two-month-old Obama administration – both in its news pages and in its neoconservative-dominated opinion section – is that the Post is the dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital and thus influences the news agendas at other mainstream outlets, such as CNN and the TV networks.

(Washington’s two other daily newspapers – the Washington Times and The Examiner – are right-wing publications.[...]

During the Bush-43 years, the Washington Post’s opinion section also became thoroughly dominated by neoconservatives and pro-Iraq War voices. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “WPost Is a Neocon Propaganda Sheet.”]

But these neocon trends extended well beyond the opinion pages, into the news sections, mostly through the Post’s framing of important national issues in ways usually favorable to Bush and to neocon sentiments.

Now, that pattern has continued into the early days of the Obama administration, with stories that selectively omit such key context as when the current recession began or that blame Obama for Republican obstructionism, rather than seeing it as a possible strategy for restoring GOP power in 2010 and 2012.

Until this problem of the U.S. news media’s rightward tilt is seriously addressed, it is hard to imagine how the nation will ever confront – let alone solve – its many challenges.