The President's Media

Imagine, if you will, that the year is 2006 and an exploratory oil drilling platform leased by one of the world's largest energy companies explodes and sinks fifty miles off Louisiana's Gulf Coast resulting in the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.  It is subsequently disclosed that the big oil company was given a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by the Mineral Managemen Service of Bush's Department of the Interior a year earlier, exempting the operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis.

A crack AP investigative team through a Freedom of Information Act request discovers that the federal government failed to conduct the oft-quoted "at least once-per-month" deepwater rig inspections on the doomed rig.  To make matters worse for the Bush administration, the Center for Responsive Politics reveals that the number one recipient of campaign contributions from the oil giant in the last election cycle was, you guessed it, President Bush.

The President's press secretary waves off questions about the relationship between the exemptions and the campaign contributions as “silly and ridiculous.”  Administration officials later contact Jake Tapper at ABC News to inform him that most of the decisions regarding the "categorical exclusion" were actually made during the Clinton administration.

What do you think the media response would have been to such a scenario?  I'll tell you what it would have been. A 24/7 feeding frenzy with calls for the President's immediate impeachment.

The scenario described above is one and the same with the BP Deepwater Horizon tragedy and disaster that occurred on April 20, 2010, except the President is not the media-reviled George W. Bush, but the messianic Barak Obama. The media response has been restrained, sympathetic, defensive, almost reluctant.

The double standard is breathtaking, but only in its predictability.