The "Polarizing" President?

This is what passes for media coverage today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/04/AR2010090402579_pf.html. Apparently it involves listening to conservative framing and repeating it without question. Reporting from the American Political Science Association, the Washington Post seems unwilling or unable to escape the general discourse in America today. While they don't blame Obama fully for the partisanship that has ensued right after his election, they put the major onus on him. For example, are quotes like this, "Obama would have been better off trying to assess what the public was prepared to accept, rather than to have acted in ways that assumed he could change it." Yet the public voted him and Democrats in in record numbers; at least by recent historical standards. He ran on hope and change and while he has little to allay the cynicism of the public, he has certainly changed the nature of the debate: including reasserting the role of government in the economy. It is united Republican opposition to anything and everything Obama does together with the fact that "A large proportion of voters on the losing side in 2008 . . . had by election day come to regard Obama as the McCain-Palin campaign had portrayed him: as an untrustworthy leftist radical with a socialist agenda . . . There was also an undertone of racial animosity." Yet the paper refuses to really focus on this aspect of what they call a populist movement. They might want to read the recent article from the New Yorker about the Koch brothers, who have funded conservative movements for years and essentially funded the events that have moved the Tea Party to the forefront of media coverage today. This is not to say that Obama does not deserve some of the blame for the current polarization. For one, he has turned away from the rhetorical flourishes that resonated with the public after eight years of Bush. And he has taken a conciliatory, post-partisan tone in much he has done that seems tone deaf to the new "party of no" GOP. And that same argument that the conservative "populism" is new is itself tone deaf to the past 30 years, since the rise of Reagan Republicans, who have consistently used populist rhetoric to garner the support of working class people who often suffer under their policies. Obama has accomplished an incredible amount in two years, particularly if you frame it within the post-Great Society years, but the media has turned on him and few report his record without quotes from conservatives or complaints about his tone, his radical agenda or the liberals and radicals who have turned against him. The supposition of a neutral media has always been as absurd as the idea that it is "liberal," but its irresponsible coverage since Bush was elected would be scandalous, if not criminal, but for a public that doesn't have the critical knowledge or care to really question them. Where is the next Edward R. Murrow to challenge this malaise?