Leadership, Messaging, Views on News • January 15th, 2009

Assessing the Bush 43 years

by Chris Lato

With Barack Obama’s inauguration right around the corner, columnists are conducting their assessments of our departing president. Some assessments are positive. Some are mixed at best. Others are consistent and unsparing in their relentless criticism.

I consider this after recently seeing ‘Frost/Nixon,’ an excellent movie that offers echoes of the current Bush administration and how the media sees these two presidents and works to ‘take them down.’

As the critiques continue to pile up, context is key. Certain writers and media outlets will simply never give Bush an ounce of credit for anything. In that sense, they discredit themselves almost instantly.

On the other hand, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a major media outlet that has consistently and without question gone the opposite way, to praise Bush at every turn. I know what you’re thinking – FOX News. But even there, Hannity had Colmes, Bill O’Reilly didn’t sing Bush’s praises at every turn, etc. I defy you to find a single positive article about George W. Bush in Rolling Stone.  If you can, I owe you a beer.

One thing I never understood is how ‘historians,’ who by definition analyze and contextualize historical figures and events, could make the insta-assessment that Bush was a bad president, or even the worst ever, before the guy has even left office. After the rhetoric has cooled, it seems a fairer assessment would be in order, warts and all. That won’t stop the Rolling Stones of the world from proclaiming Bush to be Satan incarnate, but the beauty of the information age is that we can digest it all and act as our own news filters.

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