Right now, the following things are happening in Washington:
* The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is getting ready to hold the US attorney general in contempt — an almost unprecedented act — for failing to produce subpoenaed documents in the House investigation of the botched federal gun-tracing operation known as “Fast and Furious.”
* Republicans in the House and Senate, joined by a few Democrats, are screaming bloody murder about a series of news reports in which senior Obama White House officials appeared to have leaked extraordinarily sensitive intelligence information to benefit the president’s image.
President Obama himself said on Friday that the accusation was “offensive” — even though several of the articles were openly sourced to White House officials — but then asked the aforementioned attorney general, Eric Holder, to look into it.
* The House Budget Committee is looking into allegations that several contracts for “green energy” were awarded in a new fast-track process that seemed to favor companies politically connected to the Obama administration.
Chances are, you’re at best dimly aware of these controversies, even though they’re extensively covered in right-leaning media and have been discussed in mainstream media as well.
Chances are, however, you were intimately familiar to parallel investigations into the Bush administration.
* Attorney General Alberto Gonzales spent two years dogged by accusations that he had improperly fired several US attorneys.
* Bush White House officials Scooter Libby and Karl Rove spent years under a microscope after being accused of leaking information about a covert CIA agent.
* Vice President Dick Cheney and others were accused of favoritism in awarding no-bid contracts for post-Iraq-war security and engineering to the firms Halliburton (which Cheney had run in the 1990s) and Blackwater.
The fact that the world was made exhaustively aware of the supposed Bush-era crimes and is only dimly aware of the Obama-era shenanigans drives conservatives and Republicans into a state of near-murderous fury.
And with good reason. The double standard is so obvious that it seems to defy all reason.
To take just one example: Scooter Libby was accused, though not charged or convicted, of revealing the name of a covert CIA operative, thus potentially endangering her life. In the case of “Fast and Furious,” a federal agent was in fact murdered by a gun that was effectively sold to a Mexican cartel by the Justice Department.
The panjandrums of the mainstream media usually respond to charges of being soft on Obama by citing this, that or the other story they did on Fast and Furious, or problems at Justice or the like.
As New York Times reporter Richard Stevenson wrote in response to a Politico article alleging bias: “Since the very first stirrings of the 2008 campaign, the Times has exhaustively and aggressively covered nearly every aspect of Barack Obama’s story. To suggest that we’ve pulled our punches or tilted coverage in his favor or against his opponents just is not supported by the facts.”
But the issue isn’t whether the Times or any other media organization has done some stories. What was present during the Bush years scandals but isn’t in the Obama years is “the drumbeat.”
The drumbeat happens when a story reaches critical mass in all media sectors. The New York Times and The Washington Post assign reporters to focus on it full-time. Their stories appear daily, often on the front page or in prominent locations on their Web sites.
The questions raised by those stories dominate the White House press briefing at midday. The answers at the press briefing, combined with new details, are the focus of NPR’s “All Things Considered” and the network-news programs. The reports here are strengthened by reaction from Congress members.
All that, in turn, provide the Times and the Post with more stories, and the hearings they set up and the political machinations that follow create more stories in affiliated media.
None of this is managed, manipulated or directed communally. It’s organic, the way the media business works.
Except it really hasn’t worked this way with coverage of the Obama campaign in 2008 or the Obama administration in the years since.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a series of news cycles over the course of the last four years dominated by a single story about actions under Obama’s management unfavorable to him as a candidate or as president.
Now, the odd part is that the media’s current reticence to throw the book at public officials is certainly far more fair and far less noxious than the bloodlust that overtook them during the Bush administration.
The challenge will be for the mainstream media not to succumb to the old bloodlust should there be a Romney administration.
Any bets?