Do you think Obama is a media darling? You might think again.

Here is an interesting story. A Pew Research Center report show’s President Barack Obama has been the victim of “unrelenting negative” news coverage lately. If you hate Obama and you hate the media then don’t even bother reading the rest of this post because nothing will probably change your mind. But if you have an open mind then be my guest.

Pew usually gets high marks from journalists on their studies of the media and the American people. That is because the research uses quantitative measures for studying data rather than the use of opinion polls that are biased either for or against an issue or a person.

Nonetheless, the report proves what I have thought for quite some time. I think much of the bad press is generated by a very savvy Republican propaganda machine. Now you may think that is a paranoid statement, and a conspiratorial viewpoint. But I don’t think so. It’s probably not being perpetrated at some big center, perhaps short of Fox News. Nevertheless, a lot of money is being poured into bashing the president and anyone who might remotely support his points of views.

One such contributor to this propaganda is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I don’t know how much they spend to verbally smite Obama and liberals but you can bet it is quite a bit. Although tort-reform is not entirely a conservative-liberal issue it is big on the conservative radar screen and the U.S. Chamber. The latter group operates three newspapers across the country, including one here in Southeast Texas, that are devoted to saturation bombing of stories plucked from the state, local and federal courts in order to portray the country under attack by plaintiff’s lawyers.

What the Southeast Texas Record does is okay with me because they basically make a little story out of some of the court records found in East Texas. Practically no newspaper I know of in this or any other area in the U.S. has the space to run summaries of the number of lawsuits filed. It is the USCC’s point. I understand what they are doing and the Record’s opinion pages. I also don’t think the stories — stories and not columns or editorials — show a particular bias because most time they just quote from the petitions.

I just feel that the Chamber wants to gut our constitutional rights such as those from the Seventh Amendment. And the Chamber cleverly uses its newspapers in places where they feel lawsuits and jury awards to plaintiffs are excessive to make it appear as we are being attacked by crazed plaintiffs and their lawyers. Some folks are easily swayed. That’s all I am saying.

I know that both liberal and conservative politicians say they are constantly maligned by the press. The Pew study shows how Obama really is portrayed in the media these days. And THAT really is all I am saying.