Over the weekend, CNN anchor and reporter Tom Foreman wrote a piece for CNN’s website explaining the genesis of a tradition he has kept for the last four years. He was absolutely correct that his behavior required an explanation, but the one he provided was far from adequate. Foreman has been writing President Obama a letter every single day of Obama’s first term. Some letters offered Obama advice, while others explained to Obama why Foreman rarely buys a lottery ticket. Some talked about his family, others about sports. He wondered whether Obama had read any of the 1,460 letters, and he asked the president to call if he got the chance. Some demonstrated Foreman’s lack of self-awareness more clearly than others, such as when he wrote this before Inauguration Day:
Of course, as a journalist I am paid to never get that “into” any candidate, but even if I had, I can’t imagine that I’d ever feel so strongly about an elected official that I’d pack my bags and get onto an airplane just to cheer for him or her from a distance. But hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans are going to do that in just a few days because that is how they feel about you. Isn’t that something?
As an objective CNN reporter, he would never get so “into” a candidate as to travel to watch him speak. But he would write said candidate more than a thousand letters. But beyond the strangeness of it all, and the obvious questions about bias, lies another revealing element of this. The family updates, the requests for Obama to please call him when he’s not too busy, the wondering if Obama ever read all those letters: liberals, especially those in the media, have a particularly off-putting way of treating Obama as a father figure.
Foreman’s far from alone. Whether it’s liberals writing in worshipful tones that Obama is like a basketball star taking the time out to play with kids (Congress, in this case), or Kevin Drum’s announcement that if he and Obama “were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I’d literally trust his judgment over my own,” the leftist intellectual class speaks and writes from a childlike perspective when it comes to Obama.
It is human nature to think more highly of those we agree with than those we think are usually wrong. And it is true that the liberal anti-intellectualism of recent years has not yet begun to fade. But the liberal inclination to literally–to use Drum’s word–outsource their thinking to a Democratic president is an Obama-era phenomenon. And this kind of bias as well as the more popular brand of cultish behavior will only get worse in Obama’s second term, with the president’s Second Inaugural clearly expressing the fact that yes, he is a standard-issue left-liberal and no, he’s not Eisenhower, or George H.W. Bush, or Bill Clinton or any other of the centrist personalities to which the left bizarrely and against all evidence compared Obama in his first term.
It also presents CNN with a bit of a challenge. They’re not hiding Foreman’s letters, after all–they’re promoting them. And CNN reporter Jim Acosta was observed on-air expressing his giddiness over being close to Obama at the inauguration. Of the three major cable news stations Fox has always been on the right, CNN the left, and MSNBC far out on the fringe. But CNN has sought to move MSNBC into the mainstream left and position itself in the center. It is unlikely that a single person in the country believes this. And it makes CNN look a bit ridiculous, like they’re the only ones not in on the joke.
Liberal journalism professor Jay Rosen has for quite some time advised media companies to just embrace their biases and stop pretending. It would probably earn them some goodwill from viewers, who can’t possibly take CNN seriously if the network is going to claim impartiality while its anchors are one-way pen pals with the president.
