Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, January 09, 2009 7:28:53 PM
When I first saw the post at Newsbusters,
I thought, “Oh, come on — Tavis Smiley’s just making a harmless joke.”
Unfortunately, as Smiley continues explaining that it’s up to the media
to make Obama a “great President,” it starts sounding a lot
less like a joke than a rationalization for four years of hackery on
the horizon. Hope and change!
JOE SCARBOROUGH: [Reid] says he doesn’t work for Barack Obama. I think he’s wrong.
TAVIS SMILEY: Harry Reid, put down the crack pipe. You don’t work for Barack Obama? We’re all working for Barack Obama.
SCARBOROUGH: What are your thoughts? You’re going to be on Meet The
Press next week, next Sunday before the inauguration. What are your
thoughts as we now move closer and closer to Barack Obama being sworn
in?
SMILEY: These are exciting times. When I was last year, the day
after, November 5th, the day after the election, really I was excited
then about what had happened and transpired the night before. As an
African-American male I revel in this moment. I revel in his humanity,
I revel in this victory. I love all the talk about hope and change.
Here’s what I fundamentally believe, and there have been a number of
examples since the election, Joe, that underscore this for me. I want
Barack Obama to be a great president. I want him to be a great
president. I believe that he can be a great president. But
only if we help make him a great president. It is not left to his own
devices, it’s not going to happen. We have to help make him a great
president. And that’s not casting aspersion on him. No
president who was ever great wasn’t helped in that process. There is no
Abraham Lincoln without Frederick Douglas. And we could do this all day
long. Every great president had people pushing them, had people helping
them and encouraging them, empowering them to become great presidents.
So I believe Obama can be. I want him to be. But we have to help make this guy a great president.
And a bit later . . .
SMILEY: There’s so much hype. So much hope. So much expectation. I
don’t want him to falter in stepping into his moment because the
challenges–to your point–are so great. And that’s not just a black
thing. That’s an American thing, and I’m concerned, and I’m not the
only one obviously who feels this way, I’m concerned about the people
around him about what the people allow him, all these Clintonites.
There’s a difference between being visionary and being revisionist. And
what I’m sensing is, that we got a lot of folk that want to take us
back to where we were, that’s revisionist. Can we be visionary? Can we
really step into what this moment is? And that’s why I say I want him
to be a great president. But
we got to help. We can’t abandon him now. We can’t abandon our posts.
What are we going to do to help make him a great president?
Well, one rarely sees the bias of the mainstream media laid out so
baldly. Journalists like to claim that they exist to shine a light on
the halls of power, to stop abuses and to expose malfeasance regardless
of which party controls Washington DC. Smiley, who works as a
journalist, sees his job instead as nothing more than a PR flack for
power, a cog in what could become a propaganda machine to sell Obama’s
“greatness” regardless, apparently, of what Obama actually does as President.
I guess we can chalk up PBS as another unabashed mouthpiece for
Obama, right along with MS-NBC. Perhaps we’ll get more admissions of
the obvious from other media organizations before the inauguration as
well.