By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--May 6, 2016
American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
The Obama Administration counts on the news media to serve as its echo chamber - unquestioningly spewing out talking points and narratives crafted by the administration. You know it and I know it. We talk about it all the time. It's so obvious we even bother to express any outrage about it a lot of the time, because there would scarcely be any point to that. We simply bake in media bias in all our discussions about how to combat the agenda of the left.
But it's quite astonishing to see Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's top mouthpieces and foreign policy advisors, actually brag, on the record, about how he uses these gullible clods to do his bidding for them. And he's not just bragging in generalities. He's naming names and explaining how the strategy works, all in an interview with the New York Times that was - as you might imagine - more fawning than damning.Rhodes drips with contempt for almost everyone but his boss. He consigns all those who do not share every particular of the Obama-Rhodes foreign-policy perspective to a gelatinous mass called “The Blob” — including, Samuels writes, Hillary Clinton. He thinks as little of them as he does of the journalists he and his team must spoon-feed. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes says. “They literally know nothing.” Then there are others his assistant Ned Price refers to as “force multipliers,” more senior reporters and pundits who parrot what they’re told. “I’ll give them some color,” Price says, using the journalistic term for juicy bits of inside-baseball detail, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.” A foreign-policy reporter named Laura Rozen, the most credulous conveyor of pro-Iran-deal news last year, is given a specific shout-out by White House digital guru Tanya Somander. “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,” Somanader tells Samuels. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”
The Iran deal, you may recall, was wildly unpopular with the American people. To ensure senators didn’t cast a two-thirds vote against it and kill it, the White House set up a digital response “war room” whose purpose was relentlessly to make the case that a vote against the deal was a vote for war. It could only work if water-carriers did the White House’s job for it, and nonprofit water-carriers did their faithful duty. “We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes tells Samuels about the journalists and think-tankers who were discussing the Iran deal based almost entirely on information given to them by the White House. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” Little did these denizens of Rhodes’ echo chamber know their loyalty would be seen as servility and would become the subject of post-victory gloating. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else,” Rhodes says. “So we knew the tactics that worked.” The storyline they peddled was that the Iran deal had been negotiated in a furious round of back-and-forthing in 2014 and 2015, with the United States getting far better terms out of Iran than it expected due to the flexibility of a newly moderate government in Tehran. It was, Samuels says, a deliberately misleading narrative. The general terms were actually hammered out in 2012 by the State Department officials Jake Sullivan and William Burns, rooted on Obama’s deep desire from the beginning of the administration to strike a grand deal with the mullahs. Why on earth was such conduct remotely acceptable? Because, Samuels makes clear, Rhodes and Obama believe they’re the only sensible thinkers in America and that there’s no way to get the right things done other than to spin them.I know that's a very long excerpt, but there's so much that's powerful in it, I really wanted you to see it all. Out of respect for the Post and John Podhoretz, please click over and read the whole thing. So the Obama team not only recognize that these reporters are liberal. They also recognize that they're very inexperienced and don't really know much about policy substance because they've spent all their short careeres covering political campaigns. Thus, they're easy to steer and direct, since they're ideologically predisposed to trust Obama's agenda and they don't know enough to question it when they're handed B.S. It's perfect for an administration that needs a pliant media to sell its horrible policies to the public, or at least create an environment in which those who oppose its horrible policies can't get any traction in the public debate. I suppose Rhodes feels free to talk publicly about this to the Times because hey, like always with the dinosaur media, he's among friends. Friends he manipulates for his own purposes, but is there any other kind of friend in Washington? Not for a guy like this.
Support Canada Free Press
View Comments
Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.