When asked in 2007 if the media had been unfairly harsh in its coverage of George Bush’s presidency, Newsweek editor Evan Thomas offered this frank response: “Our job is to bash the president—that’s whatwe do” (emphasis mine throughout). Thomas must have clocked out early on June 5, when he referred to President Obama as “sort of God.” Not a god—God, sort of.

During an exchange with Chris Matthews the day after President Obama’s speech in Cairo, the Bush-bashing Newsweek editor compared the new American leader with another one of his predecessors—Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Thomas said, Americans were the good guys.

Reagan was all about America. And he talked about it. Obama is, We are above that now. We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something. I mean, in a way, Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, a sort of God.

Reagan, in other words, was an unsophisticated bigot. Obama is, well, sort of God. According to Thomas, President Obama has the “moral authority” of a parent overseeing the childish nations of the world: “Now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.”

Thomas’s “analysis” must have delighted Chris Matthews. Last year, after hearing then-Senator Obama deliver a speech on the campaign trail, Matthews said he felt a “thrill” run up his leg. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Matthews gushed. “This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament.”

There was a time when mainstream journalists were downright terrified by President Bush’s acknowledgment of a higher power. That Bush prayed to God for divine guidance was seen as irresponsible—even dangerous. There simply was no room for God in the political arena, they lectured.

How ironic. These same media types now religiously place their blind faith in a mortal man they have collectively exalted in place of God.

Not surprisingly, the major media’s cultic worship of President Obama has generated an avalanche of ridiculously biased reporting. According to the Pew Research Center, positive stories about the president have outweighed the negative by a two-to-one margin. The study also found that when compared to his two most recent predecessors, Presidents Bush and Clinton, Barack Obama has received twice as much positive coverage about his personal life and leadership qualities.

Earlier this month, for example, in a report titled “Inside the Obama White House,” nbc’s Brian Williams told viewers about how strongly people react to President Obama. “We’ve seen people moved to tears after just the briefest encounter with him.” At the end of the report, Williams was seen bowing before the president as the two of them exchanged goodbyes for the night.

Over at cbs, after listening to the president’s address to the Muslim world, morning show co-host Harry Smith described the speech as powerful. “[H]e was not only presidential,” Smith said of the president, “he was also professorial. He was very much a teacher this morning. He was giving Americans and Muslims a history lesson.”

This past Sunday, when George Stephanopoulos asked his panel of commentators about President Obama’s obsessive criticism of FoxNews, conservative commentator George Will said it was because Fox was the one “discordant note in an otherwise harmonious chorus.” He then joked of the three great love affairs in world history: Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, and Barack Obama and the U.S. media.

Even President Obama seems amused by the love fest. At the 65th Annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner last week, the president jokingly acknowledged the role of journalists in creating his celebrity. “[I]t wasn’t easy coming up with fresh material for this dinner,” Obama told the crowd of media personalities. “A few nights ago, I was up tossing and turning trying to figure out exactly what to say. Finally, when I couldn’t get back to sleep, I rolled over and asked Brian Williams what he thought.”

The crowd erupted in laughter. And when President Obama concluded his 13-minute address, the throng of journalists enthusiastically rose to their feet and cheered. There’s no shame in unabashedly endorsing their cultic leader along with his liberal worldview. They’re proud of being “in bed” with the president.

It’s their new job. It’s what they do.

But in doing so, as Caroline Glick noted earlier this week, the press has abandoned the basic responsibilities of a free press to instead serve as propagandists for the president. “It is hard to think of an example in U.S. history,” Glick wrote, “in which the media organs of the world’s most important democracy so openly sacrificed the most basic responsibilities of news gatherers to act as shills for the chief executive.”

The great danger in this, she explained later, “is that the American public is denied the ability to understand the events as they unfold.”

The president’s Muslim world address is one such example of this disturbing phenomenon. During that speech, media propagandists maintain, President Obama transcended the narrowness of purely American interests and ideals. He assumed the role of world leader—even hovering above that, if we are to believe Newsweek’s editor.

In actual fact, as we highlight in our most recent print edition of the Trumpet, President Obama’s Cairo speech is, even now, beginning to violently shake the nations of this Earth! No matter what the propagandists in the media might say, that speech signaled the end of America’s standing as the world’s lone superpower, setting the stage for several end-time prophecies to accelerate in their ultimate fulfillment, as we wrote about here.

“We are witnessing a reenactment of the 1930s between Chamberlain and Hitler,” my father wrote in his latest column. “Chamberlain tried to negotiate his way to peace, as Hitler gobbled up Europe.”

And, he could have added, the media in Britain devotedly followed along—faithfully promoting, in fact, Chamberlain’s policies of appeasement and defeat. In the end, it resulted in the deaths of 50 million people worldwide.

In an age of nuclear weapons proliferation, that’s not the kind of mistake you can make twice.