Two narratives merge into one...

Since the election, elite media political coverage has entirely dropped the critiques of Barack Obama's character and past associations.  The McCain campaign narrative that originally made such accusations has simply vanished.  While this might not initially seem like much of an observation - one guy won, the other lost, end of debate - I think that this raises a rather obvious question but one with potentially serious consequences: Where did the Obama critiques go?  What if the sometimes extremely serious attacks on Obama's character and associations were true?  Right now they have been entirely dropped from public consciousness due to the elite media's decision to do so.  What does this say about the relationship between American politics and the media?  There are a couple of options here.  

1)  The attacks were false to begin with.  Elite media organizations hopefully did not have much faith in them if they dropped the coverage of possible serious issues concerning the President-Elect of the united States immediately after the election.  If this is true, then clearly the elite media feels that they are forced to cover whatever drivel both sides of a campaign put out with some degree of suspension of disbelief.  This is not a good thing!  What happened to journalistic integrity?  Journalists as arbiters of truth?  Blind advertising of campaign rhetoric by seemingly independent media is certainly detrimental to American democracy.

2) The attacks were true but elite media organizations passed along the criticisms merely as a xerox of campaign rhetoric.  If they are just passing along campaign rhetoric then whether the attacks are credible or not, American democracy is again done a disservice.  If they're true the American people go on in ignorant bliss of a dangerous truth.  If they are false then the media should never have presented the claims of the McCain camp as such.   Clearly here the media is not fulfilling its vital role of information dispenser.  The media should put more of their collective resources into investigative reporting to get to the bottom of such claims and if they are real, bring attention to them, and if not, let them die. 

3) The attacks were true and the elite media believed them to be so.  Then WHERE THE HELL IS THE COVERAGE NOW?  Just because there is no two-sided debate or angry complainer (as seen in the earliest stages of the coverage - or lack thereof - of the Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond fiasco) the elite media world is ignoring a potentially serious problem?  Again the ball is dropped here.  In this scenario the American people go on without knowing the truth about their leader - bad news.

The only claim I can think of that tempers this argument is that the news media drops such attacks in the spirit of patriotism after the election - Why attack the man who is supposed to unite all Americans?   I'll tell you why.  Because this is a free country where independent thought is encouraged and our independent press should provide the facts regardless of political ramifications and allow the American people to be the ultimate judges.

food for thought.