Obama proudly declared the night of the victorious healthcare vote, “Tonight’s vote is not a victory for any one party — it’s a victory for them. It’s a victory for the American people.”
Nancy Pelosi has also done her part to assure the American people that this bill had bipartisan effort. She spoke with Jim Lehrer on PBS and claimed that “this bill has a bipartisan imprint” and “no one has been more of an advocate for bipartisanship than the President of the United States.”
Finally, the press is taking a stand against this one-sided view of bipartisanship.
What was once a starry-eyed, Obama following press is slowly returning to the job that the mass media has been mandated to fill: the job of the watchdog.
The media has been criticized of straying from the role of keeping the government accountable and transparent and starting to create their own agendas through their articles. Lee Hamilton, a former Congressman from Indiana said:
“I am impressed about how many people in the media in Washington, D.C. really are not much interested in doing what I at least would consider the basics of journalism, which is to ask questions, to explain, to examine, and to describe. What many are interested in being is a player in the policy game” (Nieman Reports, 11).
Columnist Ed Bishop points to three reasons why journalism has lost its validity:
- Most news media is owned by conglomerates
- Fewer journalists working than 10 years ago
- Theoretical problem with objectivity (St. Louis Journalism Review, 3).
The press has difficulty separating opinion from fact. But, this does not mean that they never cover stories objectively – or at least with an attempt at promoting transparency.
On March 20, 2010, the New York Times quoted Nancy Pelosi as saying to the President, ““We’re in the majority. We’ll never have a better majority in your presidency in numbers than we’ve got right now. We can make this work.”
Does this sound like a bipartisan effort to you?
I didn’t think so either. This goes against what we have been hearing for months from the press. The watchdog may be finally waking up.