Not everyone in the media has fallen in love with Obama.

From Ad Age

In recent weeks I happened to read three different articles that all invoked the late Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous five-stage “Grief Cycle” in regard to the economic crisis. You know the drill: Humans tend to react to loss with denial, followed by anger, followed by bargaining, followed by depression, followed by acceptance.

Given last week’s media-fueled Obama mania, I’ve been thinking about the stages of, well, media euphoria. Generally there are only two such stages: on and off.  It’s been conventional wisdom for at least a year now that the media is “in the tank for Obama” (in fact, start typing “in the tank” into Google’s home-page search box, and it will automatically complete the phrase with “for Obama”— and point you to endless stories about the media’s love affair with O). But all political infatuations must come to an end—and already you can begin to see the media straining mightily to assert its “objectivity” regarding our new POTUS. For instance, the Los Angeles Times editorial board got big notice on Jim Romenesko’s media blog last week when it rather hilariously declared, “We pledge to watch Obama, to hold him to his work, and to report back.” (As one commenter wrote at latimes.com, “Why the sudden commitment to ‘journalism’? During the campaign, the LAT was all but running advertorials for Obama.”)

There actually may be hope that the Obama media honeymoon will be shorter than expected.

 

 

 

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