It’s a story idea that seems harmless enough, maybe even unremarkable: What’s the president’s golf game really like?
But a Sunday New York Times story on the subject stirred up surprisingly passionate feelings among President Obama’s critics and defenders alike, not necessarily for the content of the story but apparently for the fact that it was written at all.
On Fox News, Geraldo Rivera called it “a big, fat, wet kiss for the president.”
Steve Doocy, also of Fox News, said the story was “clearly a valentine on behalf of the New York Times toward the president.”
And yet, the piece, by Times reporter Michael Schmidt, did not paint an especially flattering portrait of Obama or his golf course skills.
“President Obama’s drives were consistently short. It often took him one shot too many to get his ball on the green. And when he finally took out his putter, he struggled with his touch,” read the story’s opening.
It centered on Obama’s tendency to keep details about his golf outings private, save a few public comments about his scores. The president played several rounds during his holiday stay in Hawaii.
“For much of his presidency, Mr. Obama routinely shot in the 90s and low 100s — respectable scores for an occasional golfer but not particularly good for someone who played as often as he did, golf professionals said,” the Times said.
The story recalled the occasion over the summer when Obama headed to a golf course right after giving a public statement condemning the beheading of an American journalist by Islamic jihadi radicals.
The story closed with an anonymous complimentary quote from someone who has golfed with Obama. “If you came down from Mars and saw his disposition on the golf course, you would think he would be a pretty good president,” it said.
Regardless, many took exception with Schmidt’s reporting.
“Is this [Times] story on Obama’s golf game for real? I mean, seriously…” tweeted Brian Rosenthal, a reporter for the Texas Houston Chronicle.
Others took a more sarcastic tone. “And now, 1189 words on Obama’s golf game,” tweeted Josh Petri, an editor at the viral news website Digg.
Eric Boehlert of the liberal Media Matters for America shared the link to the story on Twitter with a dismissive, “Just stop…”
Schmidt was unfazed by the criticism. “In this case, like all others, I set out to learn as much as I could about something and report what I found in a fair and straightforward manner,” he told the Washington Examiner media desk. “You might see where partisan folks and pundits would have a difficult time getting their heads around that.”
