The New York Times earned its keep as a foot soldier for the Obama administration as White House correspondent Michael D. Shear offered a piece in Monday’s paper lamenting that many of the President’s foreign trips have been “hijacked” by breaking news stories with the Paris terror attacks “spawn[ing] another distraction” from Obama’s agenda.
Painting the dead bodies over the course of his presidency in Paris, Mali, Israel, and Ukraine as “swirl[s] of other news” that have “overshadowed” Obama, Shear chalked it up as “a vivid reminder of how quickly and easily a president’s message can be hijacked by events and agendas beyond his control — and how important it can be to the White House to respond in real time, even from a distance.”
Shear explained that Obama’s trip last week was spent not talking about trade in Asia (as planned) but instead involved “in grim consultations about the attacks in Paris and Mali and in a long-distance war of words with Republicans.”
He then hyped that the President has “almost always” been a victim of other’s circumstances and “a vivid reminder of how quickly and easily a president’s message can be hijacked”:
Like so many of his previous overseas trips, the president’s trade and economic missions to Turkey, the Philippines and Malaysia were quickly eclipsed by the swirl of other news, overshadowed by the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in France and Mali and the red-hot debate back home about whether to stop admitting Syrian refugees.
It has been a source of endless frustration for Mr. Obama and his aides that the traveling press corps often overlooks his diplomacy abroad, instead questioning him about congressional standoffs, domestic scandals or global turmoil.
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It is a vivid reminder of how quickly and easily a president’s message can be hijacked by events and agendas beyond his control — and how important it can be to the White House to respond in real time, even from a distance. Despite his command of a communications infrastructure — one that includes Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — Mr. Obama is subject to the vagaries of the news cycle even when he is abroad.
Going through a number of circumstances going back to the instability in Libya erupting while he was in Brazil to Russian intervention in Ukraine during his trip to Mexico in 2014, Shear chronicled how the G-20 Summit in Turkey and Obama’s subsequent excursions to southeast Asia featured other breaking global news stories:
The terrorist attacks in Paris, which took place just hours before Air Force One left the United States for the Group of 20 summit meeting in Antalya, Turkey, changed the gathering’s dynamic. The conflict in Syria had always been on the agenda, but the assault by the Islamic State far outside its territory in Iraq and Syria pushed it to the top.
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Even before Mr. Obama reached Manila a few days later, the Paris attacks had spawned another distraction for him. Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates had seized on the attacks as evidence that Syrian refugees should not be let into the United States.
Aides said the president received briefings on the comments but also followed them himself, reading news accounts on his iPad — and fuming about them. When he did not receive a question about refugees at his first news conference, he brought it up himself, mocking comments by the Republican candidate Jeb Bush that only Christian refugees — not Muslims — should be considered for entry.
Writing as if it were a post on a White House blog, Shear complained that “even as the Paris attacks receded a bit toward the end of his trip, Mr. Obama did not catch a break” as the terrorist attack on a hotel in Mali broke while he was taking part in a town hall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The New York Times reporter eventually concluded that the trip served as “a reminder that presidents do not control the agenda, no matter where in the world they find themselves.”
