Andrew Ferguson‘s latest “Press Man” column for Commentary notes one of the more recent additions to the president’s media arsenal.
[T]hrough the Internet the president has access to a universe of fanboys — blogging and tweeting around the clock — who don’t even require marching orders before they double-time it into battle. Bob Woodward can tell you all about them. In late February, the well-known and often idolized Watergate reporter wrote a damaging op-ed in the Post, refuting the president’s careful denial of his own role in bringing on the sequester. Woodward even went on Fox News to drive the point home.
The White House press office issued a limp denial, but it was the fanboys who leapt into action. One of them, a blogger called Josh Marshall, compared Woodward to one of the crackpots who think Obama was born in Africa. Another blogger from Time magazine portrayed him as a befuddled had-been. “Bob Woodward is senile,” said another. Salon magazine’s tweeter insisted: “Bob Woodward has lost it, let’s all stop indulging him.” The blizzard of tweets and posts had the intended effect of burying Woodward’s original accusation. The story was no longer whether the president’s version of events surrounding the sequester was honest or even accurate. The story was, bizarrely, Woodward himself: his character, his politics, his sanity.
In the era of the tweeting fanboy, the question of whether the White House reporters are right-wing of left-wing, puppyish or hostile, is suddenyl rendered moot. One important strand of the sequester story simply passed them by; it belonged to Obama’s corps of bloggers, doing the White House’s bidding through blind ideological instinct. The traditional interplay between president and press, a subject beloved of ideologues and presidential historians alike, may no longer be relevant.
