Obama has been enduring some of the toughest press criticism of his presidency. Media doesn't hold back on Obama

President Barack Obama is damaging his presidency, weakening America’s standing in the world, and displaying “inexplicable” incompetence.

The media figure making those accusations isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, Charles Krauthammer or Glenn Beck. The critic doesn’t host a right-wing talk show, anchor a Fox News program, or write for the pages of the Weekly Standard. In fact, he’s not even a conservative.


It’s Joe Klein, the Time Magazine political columnist. “Obama has lost some serious altitude: In the world, with the Congress, and most importantly with the American people,” Klein, a veteran journalist and political moderate, told POLITICO.

( WATCH: How the media covered Obama’s Syria address)

Klein isn’t alone: In recent months, and especially since the start of the Syria mess, Obama has been enduring some of the toughest and most widespread press criticism of his four-and-a-half years as president. It isn’t just coming from the usual suspects on the right. Increasingly, the skepticism is coming from the center and even from the left — from White House reporters, progressive editorial boards, foreign policy experts and MSNBC hosts.

And Obama has mostly himself to blame for the recent wave of media negativity (although the Republicans have been glad to lend a hand). To hear the press tell it, his handling of the Syria crisis has been confusing and contradictory at best, making him appear weak on the international stage. His administration’s persecution of whistleblowers and surveillance of the press are at odds with the promises he made as a candidate. His inability to push a progressive agenda through congress makes him appear ineffective.

( Also on POLITICO: Arabic media's view of Obama)

In interviews with POLITICO, reporters and pundits from across the ideological spectrum noted that Obama has fewer and fewer safe harbors in the fourth estate. Five years ago, the media was seen as being so sympathetic to the junior Senator from Illinois that it irked even his Democratic challengers. But in his second term as president the tone of both the news coverage and the editorial analysis has become far more critical. Of course, with more than two years left in his term, the notoriously fickle press’s pendulum could always swing back in Obama’s direction, particularly now that the immediate Syria crisis appears to have abated, at least for the time being.

But for now even Media Matters For America, the liberal watchdog group dedicated to monitoring conservatives, has noticed a new level of hostility toward the president from mainstream and liberal outlets.

“It is now almost universally hostile,” Eric Boehlert, a senior writer at the organization, told POLITICO. “It’s become consistently critical.”

( Also on POLITICO: Obama: 'Less concerned about style points')

Chuck Todd, the NBC News political director and chief White House correspondent, credited the change in tone to public sentiment.

“I think it is the public and the press reflects the public,” Todd said. “The NSA started it and he hasn’t recovered.”

Conservatives also see the change, and relish that the same folks who they formerly saw as “in the tank” for Obama have started taking a more critical stance.

“There are indications that the media’s Obama Fever is beginning to break,” said Laura Ingraham, the conservative talk-radio host and Fox News contributor. “For five years, he has gotten a sweetheart deal from the media industrial complex… But it shouldn’t have taken the president’s disappearing red-line in Syria… and his being played like a Stradivarius by Putin for the press to lose their crush.”

The White House declined to comment for this story.

Obama’s response to Syria may represent a low-point in the media’s coverage, but the reasons for the change in tone are myriad and predate recent events. Senior political reporters, many of whom declined to be quoted on record, cited revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, the Justice Department’s monitoring of reporters, President Obama’s use of drone strikes, and a series of perceived scandals — including the IRS’s targeting of the tea party and the unanswered questions about the Sept. 11 raid on Benghazi — as factors in the media’s increasingly critical tone.

( WATCH: Obama’s full speech on Syria)

If you feel like you’ve seen this movie before, it’s because you have. In 2006, many of President George W. Bush’s defenders turned on him as well. Then as now, the negative coverage was spurred on by skepticism of the president’s foreign policy. One year after praising the Bush White House’s handling of the Iraq war, The National Review was criticizing “the administration’s on-again-off-again approach.” Former defenders like columnists like George Will and William F. Buckley similarly critiqued the White House’s Middle East ambitions.

In the pages of The Washington Post, then-staff writer Peter Baker wrote, Bush “can no longer even rely as much on once-friendly voices in the conservative media to stand by his side… While most conservative media figures have not abandoned Bush, influential opinion-makers increasingly have raised questions, expressed doubts or attacked the president outright, particularly on foreign policy, on which he has long enjoyed their strongest support.”

As a rule, second terms are hard on presidents. In part, that’s simply because the incumbent has had more time to show his weaknesses and bring down his public approval rating. Obama’s has slipped from 69 percent on his inauguration day, in 2009, to 44 percent on the day he delivered his public remarks on Syria, according to Gallup.

But even President Bill Clinton, who experienced higher approval ratings toward the end of his White House tenure, came in for some of his harshest criticism during his last days in office.

“There are not many presidents who deep into their second-term get great press,” Boehlert said. “Clinton left with a 67-percent approval rating and he was mauled in the press. The D.C. press was so sick of him, and he was the most popular president in modern history. Structurally, eight years is a long time.”

Though it is tempting to see the negative coverage as a result of the press’s fatigue, reporters say President Obama has no one to blame but himself for the recent string of negative clips.

“A bad patch with the press is when they’re getting bad coverage or they’re at odds with the media over their press relations posture. Right now they’re getting bad coverage on the merits,” one senior-level Washington reporter said.

“The tougher coverage right now reflects the reality that we are adrift,” said another high-level correspondent. “On Syria, contradictions are coming out of the White House every five minutes — they’re in the same sentence.”

The administration’s apparent confusion over Syria has been cause for some especially negative coverage.

“What is the Obama administration plan in Syria? It depends on whom you ask and when,” Dana Milbank, the Washington Post columnist, wrote the day after the speech. Echoing Karl Rove, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called it “amateur hour” at the White House and accused Obama of “flip-flopping, ambivalent leadership.”

On Twitter, leading foreign policy journalists panned Obama’s speech: David Rothkopf, the CEO of the Foreign Policy Group, called it “very probably the least consequential vitally important speech ever.” In an email to POLITICO, Rothkopf called the speech “a string of his recent arguments culminating in a punt.”

But no critique was quite so devastating as Klein’s column for Time, in which he accused the president of “one of the more stunning and inexplicable displays of presidential incompetence that I’ve ever witnessed.”

Klein told POLITICO that he has long been “supportive but critical” of Obama and of past presidents. But he finds Obama’s public pronouncements on Syria to be “inexplicable and perplexing and stunning.”

“He has damaged his presidency and weakened the nation’s standing in the world,” Klein wrote in his column.

Conservative observers see such portrayals of Obama as the inevitable result of the president’s failures.

”It’s tough for the media to see the glass as half-full when the economy is sluggish at best, unemployment in many areas is through the roof, we’re talking about going to war, we’ve had a crazy mixed-up two weeks with Syria,” Fox News host Greta Van Susteren told POLITICO. “It’s his job to be the leader. The buck stops with him.”

“Many in the media made an investment in Barack Obama in 2008, and they want ROI,” S.E. Cupp, the conservative co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, said. “When he proved to disappoint in many areas — transparency and civil liberties most notably — I think they understandably took on a more skeptical posture. Whether that reflects a crisis of conscience or credibility, only they know.”

Of course, President Obama is not entirely without supporters. Some safe harbors remain open.

At odds with the conventional wisdom, Andrew Sullivan, a very loyal Obama supporter, called the Syria address “one of the clearest, simplest and most moving presidential speeches to the nation I can imagine.”

Others, while not praising the president, have eschewed the caravan of criticism and instead argued that Obama has managed to achieve the best possible outcome in Syria — even if he got there by accident: They include, among others, E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, and Greg Sargent at The Washington Post. Ezra Klein, the Post’s WonkBlog columnist, called Russia’s Syria proposal “a potential victory” for the administration.

Where the media’s coverage goes from here depends on a number of factors largely out of Obama and the media’s control. Conservatives are hardly holding their breath. Ingraham cautioned that “like any nasty virus, Obama Fever can always come back. And it probably will.”

The Post’s Milbank said that negative coverage was “sort of a cyclical thing that largely follows the polls,” but acknowledged that negative attitudes toward Obama could just be the new, enduring reality.

“This could be a long three years,” he said.