Andrew Kohut, Pew’s polling chief, notes that the media’s focus had “much to do with how different he is as President. His race. His temperament. He’s a new kind of President, and the press is fascinated by the new.” Even within the Beltway, operatives cheered for the election of the first African-American President. Mark McKinnon, who served as a media adviser to President George W. Bush and to John McCain during the primaries, refused to work against Obama after he won the nomination. “It’s like rooting for a teen-ager to win the U.S. Open,” he said. (Melanie Oudin, a seventeen-year-old from Georgia, was in the U.S. Open quarter-finals at the time.) A Pew study found that in Obama’s first hundred days in office stories about him that were “clearly positive in tone” outnumbered those about Bush in his first hundred days by a ratio of nearly two to one.
The second paragraph on the third page helped me understand the article better. Andrew Kohut spoke of how the media focused on how different the new president is. How even though others were running, more people cheered for Obama because he would be the first African-American President. When Obama won the election, as Pew’s study found out, his first one hundred days in office were positive and outnumbered those first one hundred days for Bush. This goes to show that the media does look for new stories to focus on. That new is better than old and that stories never end. Those people who note these stories look at them more in-depth.
Something more:
ReplyDeleteSort of implies that since Obama could be the first African-American President he was sort of the under dog just like the teenager who was in the U.S. Open quarterfinals. People in America like to see bright new change and that's why the author relates Obama to the teenager because Obama was favored for his new voice, ideas, and race. The author is not belittling Obama for being favored because he could be seen as an "under dog" but rather as something new that our country needed and the citizens of America could see that as well. The first hundred days he was in office all the office stories were positive because he was something new, unlike Bush who was hated more than favored, Obama possessed something new that Americans could feel so he was blessed with a positive outlook.
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ReplyDeletethis makes me think that race may be factor and your childhood background could be a factor to how much media exposure you get. People of America love those grew up in a one room house with 5 kids kind of stories and obama had those kind of stories going for him. That is a sucker for the media and he has the childhood life and his race adding to the factor of the media on him like glue. And just like he said before me about Obama being a new face to the white house and people loved him and all of the media was positive things and all the happy things but as soon the 100 days of office were over with that is when the smallest negatives started to become big media stories with the Obama family. The way media looks at things is how America looks at things as well