On page 12 of Tuesday’s New York Times there is a photo of staff at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo preparing the first issue since jihadis murdered their editor and nine other journalists last week.
On the newsroom wall behind the journalists is a poster showing President Obama leaning back with a wide smile beside the one-word headline: “Yes!”
That’s about as close as the Times has come to critiquing the president’s snub of the mass march through Paris on Sunday, said to be the largest since the Germans were driven out by the Allies in 1944.
Other world leaders led the march, which forcefully expressed solidarity against Islamist attacks on free speech. There was French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a host of others.
But Obama stayed home. So did Vice President Joe Biden. Attorney General Eric Holder did not go to the march even though he was in Paris for a previously scheduled meeting. It’s now known as Obama’s “Paris Snub.”
Conservative editorialists at the Wall Street Journal and the front page editors of the New York Daily News weighed in strongly the morning after the Paris march, but other editors and columnists have kept mostly quiet on the issue.
“A fair conclusion is that the White House didn’t think it mattered,” the Journal wrote Tuesday of the snub. No high-ranking administration officials attended. “This fits Mr. Obama’s generally dismissive attitude toward Europe.”
Accompanying the editorial was a blog post by conservative writer Peggy Noonan, who said the affair showed Obama is “wholly out of sync with U.S. thinking and sentiment.”
The Journal’s criticism was mild, however, compared to the New York Daily News headline Monday that screamed “You Let The World Down.” The daily tabloid is owned by real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, a Democrat who also owns and edits U.S. News & World Report and formerly owned The Atlantic magazine.
The Daily News’ cross-town competitor, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, was somewhat more restrained, declaring: “Sorry, Charlie: Obama’s team goes AWOL at Paris rally against terror.”
During the march Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper told viewers that “as an American, I do wish that we were better represented in this beautiful procession of world leaders.” He made clear that he was speaking for himself, not the cable network, but his disappointment was clear.
Obama spokesman Josh Earnest scrambled Monday to admit that the White House “should have sent somebody with a higher profile.”
Elsewhere, criticism from the news media has been muted among outlets that normally lean favorably in Obama’s direction. The Washington Post’s initial Monday story on the march didn’t mention Obama’s absence on the front page.
Neither did the New York Times or USA Today. The Journal’s lead news story devoted one sentence to the absence of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Similarly, Huffington Post initially went with an Associated Press story on the march that said nothing about Obama’s absence.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote on the matter, but the point of his op-ed was to accuse Obama’s critics, mostly congressional Republicans, of “a bit of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in criticizing the Obama administration for snubbing a people [the French] they not long ago called cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”
There was no editorial by the Post, though another columnist for the paper, the controversial Richard Cohen, said, if not a snub, the lack of U.S. presence in Paris was “the usual Obama detachment.”
None of the columnists who appear on Tuesdays in the New York Times, including conservative David Brooks, touched the snub. The only mention from the Times’ opinion writers came in the form of an online blog post, bylined by the editorial staff. “No comment,” it said.
Mike Huckabee, a potential GOP presidential candidate and former governor of Arkansas, penned the only piece critical of Obama for USA Today. USA Today frequently takes on controversial issues to editorialize on them, then allowing a competing view in a separate column. No such pairing has yet appeared on Obama’s Paris debacle.
Politico noted some of the criticism from news media Monday, but the National Journal’s Ron Fournier left no doubt about his take, writing:
“But this was no disgrace. No embarrassment. No snub. Get a grip. Just as Obama has a responsibility to recognize and exploit the power of presidential symbolism, his critics must not forget the importance of context. There are bigger things to worry about — and more important failings of the Obama administration — than the delicate feelings of the French.”
