Finally, there is the Newsweek cover story by Niall Ferguson: “Hit the Road, Barack: Why We Need a New President.” It comes across as a refreshing sign of media even-handedness, after Newsweek’s beatification of Obama jus three months ago. And yet there is something disingenuous about the magazine’s sudden lurch into the anti-Obama column–not an appeal to new readers, after repelling many over the past several years with countless examples of left-wing bias, but just an appeal for attention, plain and simple. Ferguson’s article hits the mark, but what comes across in the online version of the piece–interspersed with Newsweek’s self-promoting Tweets–is the eagerness with which the editors want to make themselves the topic of conversation.
That is best understood as a cry for help–for Romney’s selection of Ryan, which defied expectations, and which is proving every day to have been a success, is a harsh reminder that the liberal orthodoxies imposed by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party have lost their control over the popular imagination. The Romney campaign has learned to speak past the media, directly to the American people. The mainstream media is beginning to understand that–which is why the first cracks are appearing in the uniform edifice of media support for the Obama campaign. More than losing an election, what the left-dominated media fear is losing their power over public discourse. And so they, like the Democratic Party itself, are throwing up distractions. If those cost votes–so be it, as long as the media are still able to direct the conversation.
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