The media slumbered under Obama

1. Trump and his administration speak falsely and sloppily much more than previous presidents.
2. When reporting and explaining the misdeeds of Trump, we now have a lot more competition from the rest of the media than we did when we were reporting on the misdeeds of President Obama.

I gave a few examples of stories that under Trump would be major front-page splashes with MSNBC and CNN coverage across a whole day, but which I had almost to myself under Obama. Take a second and imagine these stories under Trump.

• In violation of the President’s executive order, a former lobbyist from Google communicated with current lobbyists at Google over a regulatory issue where the White House and Google agreed (and Google would profit).
• Despite an executive order barring appointees working on matters affecting their former employers, the President hired the former CEO of H&R Block to draft new regulations on tax preparers. H&R Block lobbied in support of those rules (which were illegal, a federal judge ruled), which analysts said would help the company by killing its competitors.
• Obama claimed in his State of the Union Address “We have excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.” This was simply false. No major media pointed out the falsehood of it at the time. The Washington Post’s “fact-check” piece mentioned how some lobbyists were deregistering, and maybe excluding lobbyists was a bad idea, but nobody reported that Obama had in fact hired dozens of lobbyists in policymaking jobs.

I could provide dozens of examples like this, which the media missed under Obama, and which they blow up about under Trump. I don’t mind the blowing up — I wish they had done it for the past 8 years.

Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s commentary editor, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.