Robert Parry: Framing Obama -- by the WPost

[babylonsister]

Framing Obama -- by the WPost

By Robert Parry
March 19, 2009 (A Special Report)


An insidious power of a propagandistic newspaper – especially one with great influence – is how it can “frame” an issue so the assumptions behind a story guide the readers to a preordained conclusion under the guise of presenting a fair journalistic account.

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.”

more...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/031909.html

[marylanddem]

1. Exactly why I quit subscribing this month, after like 30 years...

They went one anti-Obama headline too many.
And it was exactly that headline referenced by Parry - about Obama blaming Bush - that did it for me.
Fuck the Washington Post. This is an excellent article about the way the vaunted Post twists truth.

[Captain Hilts]

2. I cancelled my subscription after they hired Michael Gerson. nt