The Press Gave Bush a Free Pass on Oil Spill, but Have a Different Narrative for Obama

FLASHBACK: During Exxon Valdez disaster, George H. W. Bush got a free pass from the press

On the night of June 10, NBC’s Nightly News aired one of its many reports about the BP oil spill disaster. In this segment, Lisa Myers examined “what the government knew about how bad the leak could be and how much they told the public,” as Brian Williams put it. The report leaned heavily on the question of whether the Obama administration “leveled with the public” about the severity of the spill.

The rather breathless Nightly News segment, with lots of what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it implications, perfectly captured the news media’s somewhat odd obsession, virtually from Day One of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, with making Obama a central figure, if not the responsible player, in the drama about an oil-industry catastrophe.

No, the government didn’t operate or own the rig. And oil giant BP was obviously the responsible party. Yet the press immediately focused in on Obama.

....Well, not by most. A St. Petersburg Times editorial did condemn the federal government’s “ineffectual” and “almost blithe” reaction to the monster spill. And there were a couple of other media darts thrown Bush’s way. But they were the exceptions. For instance, I can’t find any examples of mainstream outlets suggesting Bush “owned” the Exxon spill. And I didn’t see these kinds of very unsubtle headlines and images, courtesy of the New York Times, used during the Valdez coverage:

During the 1989 man-made disaster, corporate media journalists didn’t obsess over whether or not Bush was showing enough emotion. They didn’t conduct poll after poll to figure out Bush’s “grade” for handling the spill. They didn’t fixate on stagecraft. And they certainly didn’t include the president on lists of people who were “to blame for the oil spill,” the way Time recently included Obama on such a list, blaming him for the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. (Why was Obama to “blame”? Because “shortly before” the disaster, he proposed allowing for more offshore drilling. And no, that doesn’t make any sense.)

One could call it the media tax. Republicans can lie us into a war and wreck the economy, but the press tells us its all good because is a Republican. A Democrat doesn't wave a magic wand and correct all the problems Republicans created and that becomes the narrative.