Listen to the talking heads on some cable news channels, or read reports in mainstream newspapers and you get a dire picture of President Obama’s political standing.
Why, those troublesome polls show his popularity “plummeting,” “sinking,” “spiraling downward.”
Media Matters — an acknowledged left-wing media watchdog group — disagrees.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/10/31/obamas-approval-rating-remains-unchanged-this-y/201396
The organization points out correctly that Barack Obama’s standing among Americans has remained unchanged for the past year.
Unchanged!
His numbers are stable. They aren’t sinking or plummeting. They aren’t spiraling anywhere, let alone downward.
Why do the media keep harping on something that’s, well, untrue?
Media Matters examines some poll number averages: “According to the cumulative ratingsĀ posted daily at Real Clear Politics, which averages together an array of national polls to come up with Obama’s composite job approval rating, the president’s approval on January 1, 2014 stood at 42.6 percent. The president’s approval rating on October 30, was 42 percent. So over the course ofĀ 10 months, and based on more than one hundred poll results in 2014, Obama’s approval rating declined less than one point.”
Holy smokes! Does that constitute a president whose standing is headed straight for the dumper? I think not.
It’s interesting, too, that Media Matters isn’t targeting just the right-wing media — a favorite target — in critiquing the bogus reports of Obama’s standing. It cites mainstream media across the spectrum, even those dreaded “liberal media” outlets that supposedly can say nothing critical of the president or his friends in Congress.
The link attachedĀ is most interesting and it puts the president’s standing in a context that bears little resemblance to what the media are reporting.