The new year got off to a dark, dismal start for Fox News staffers when on Monday, Gallup posted its latest polling results regarding Obama's job rating: He hit it the 50 percent approval mark, having climbed nine points from a low in late October. It was the first time Obama had reached the symbolic half-century mark since late May 2010, and I'm guessing folks at Fox News were not happy.
And there was more bad news for Fox this week. Another poll, this one from Opinion Research, found that nearly two-thirds of Americans hope Obama succeeds this year, while 73 percent "approve" of Obama as a person.
So why the sad faces at Fox News? Because it's the job of Rupert Murdoch's cable channel to make sure Obama fails. Fox News, along with the larger, unreliable GOP Noise Machine, remains dedicated to undermining and destroying Obama's presidency. Not to hold Obama accountable or challenge his polices, but to destroy his presidency. Fox News' entire corporate mission is to be an anchor around Obama's neck and to drive his approval numbers into the 30s.
And right now, Fox News is losing. Despite its Herculean efforts, Fox News over the last year has been unable to move the needle on Obama's Gallup rating:
-Jan. 2, 2010: 51 percent
-June 2, 2010: 49 percent
-Jan. 2, 2011: 50 percent
Why the futility? It's probably because outside the walls of the right-wing media echo chamber, news consumers are becoming numb to the relentless attacks and hysterical claims made about Obama.
It's telling that the president has been able maintain that same level of support for more than a year despite a hyper-active right-wing media machine that stretches from television to radio and to the internet and is dedicated to furiously attacking him on an hourly basis. It's a machine that remains utterly committed to ginning up every conceivable type of controversy to drag Obama, his administration, and even his family through the mud in an endless attempt to discredit the man and to destroy his presidency.
Yet in the face of that avalanche of invective, there Obama sat this week, right around Gallup's 50 percent approval mark, which put him, at least temporarily, 13 points higher than where Ronald Reagan was at the same juncture of his first term in office.
It must be driving Fox News bonkers.
Read the entire column here, at Media Matters.
Follow Eric Boehlert on Twitter: www.twitter.com/EricBoehlert
If I want to express my primeval tribal prejudices there is a wholesome and legitimate outlet for that sort of thing in the sports pages.
What is this? It's David v Goliath, depending on your tribe as to which one is "David", and as long as our "David" is winning, all's well with the world? As long as we hear that "their" Goliath gets one in the groin, then all's well for our futures?
Do Obama's staff or Fox's managers give a dam what happens to this country as long as one gets re-elected and the other gets good ratings?
All is not well with the world, and both of these putative champions are extremely destructive to all of our lives.
When did being "well-liked" or having high ratings become a be all/end all for all of our personal lives? Yes, Obama is "well liked" and will continue to be "well liked" because like his cited role model, Reagan, he knows how to be pleasant teflon, and that likely will maintain regardless of the degree of misery and uncertainty that maintains in the lives of the rest of us. All's well as long as Obama is forgiven?
For an entire year, they did everything possible, from throwing kitchen sinks to beating dead horses, to destroy his candidacy; yet he won the nomination anyway.
Then, for the next year, they threw the same kitchen sink and beat the same dead horses to defeat his bid for the presidency; yet he was elected anyway.
Since the President's election, Fox's efforts to politically destroy him have not abated. Their complicity with the tea party movement, their exploitation of America's racial divide to diminish support in the white community, their very deliberate attempt to dismantle President Obama's signature healthcare legislation, their single-handed destruction of ACORN (as if ACORN alone was solely responsible for President Obama's election and as if they did something wrong), their twists and turns and spins ... and yet, two years later, they lose again!
I imagine that they will re-double their efforts to destroy the President as we approach the 2012 election, but I have no doubt that they will lose that battle as well.
But I'm sure there are some TP'ers out there who are still worried about this and of course before they go to bed for the night they also check to make sure there's no Commies hiding under the bed.
I'd hope most Americans would appreciate that they have a calm, thoughtful President who can speak in full comprehensible sentences without mangling the English language or torturing its syntax. The fact that he has a lovely wife and two adorable children is just frosting on the cake.
No—he hasn't done everything I'd wish and he needs to use the bully pulpit more. But when I stop and think of what a nightmare this country would be if John McCain and the Witless Wasillian had won I definitely say a silent prayer of thanks.
Fox has about as much in common with news, as professional wrestling has with sports.
Why are advertisers required to tell the truth (truth in advertising laws) and the media they appear on isn't?
With apologies to Emerson "Fox is proof that people are gullible".