There’s an opportunistic “conservative media” ready to pounce on President Barack Obama. Who knew?
On MSNBC’s “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews trotted out a quasi-conspiracy theory, saying the “right-wing media machine” — including Rush Limbaugh and Fox News — are awaiting a terrorist attack with knives sharpened to go after Obama.
“If something breaks against us in terms of a terrorist attack, you say the entire right-wing media machine led by Limbaugh and Fox [News] and everybody else will say, ‘Yeah, we warned you,’” Matthews said Thursday.
According to Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, a guest on Matthews’s program, the hypothesis was correct. The “very conservative media” wouldn’t unite behind Obama but they would “make a lot of trouble” for the president. He acknowledged the existence of “a liberal media” and warned of a hidden alliance between this so-called conservative media and the Republican Party.
“Yeah, and it’s his fault no matter what the facts are because we used to talk about a liberal media in this country, and there was a liberal media for much of the 20th century,” Alter said. “Now we have a very powerful conservative media. And they are very, very effective at driving a political agenda. They work hand-in-glove with the Republican Party and they will make a lot of trouble for Barack Obama if he slips up.
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But before that were to happen, Alter offered advice for the president.
“So what he has to do is he has to appeal to independents by developing what I think of as innovation nation,” Alter said. “Whatever he wants to call it, where he says, ‘I’m on the side of small business. I’m the small business president. I’m looking out not just for my liberal constituents.’”
However, even the admittedly left-of-center “Hardball” host was skeptical of Alter’s suggestion.
“It’s hard to sell for a guy who comes from Saul Alinksy all of a sudden he’s a big burgher and bourgeois president,” Matthews said.
Alter didn’t back off and said it could happen. He said Obama needed the right words, because after all, words matter.
“He’s got to connect with the inventive American. You talk about the core of the soul of this country, it’s inventing and developing ideas,” Alter said. “[H]e can do that, he just needs to find the right words.”
