If the media had fulfilled its critically important duties, Barack Obama would not have been elected or reelected president. The media is not motivated by professionalism and integrity but rather by fear, prejudice, guilt, and bias.

How important is the media? How much damage can result when they don't fulfill their responsibilities? The press is the only private institution the founding fathers included in the Constitution. Obviously they recognized its importance.

The mainstream media has a kind of inverted colorblindness. Their form of colorblindness causes them to see nothing but color. More specifically, it means they cannot see anything but a person's skin color.

The foremost beneficiary of their malady is Barack Obama. He is president today because the media and many voters could not see anything but the color of his skin.

They are the polar opposite of Martin Luther King's character-not-skin-color dream. Making race such a huge issue is itself a kind of racism. Overreaction to a problem often does far more damage than the problem itself. The amount of racial guilt in America is way out of proportion with the amount of racism that actually exists.

The media were so taken with the historical significance of "the first black president" that nothing else mattered to them. Obama became the most unexamined presidential candidate in history. We have paid, and will continue to pay a huge price for their blindness.

Just days before Obama was elected in 2008, Tom Brokaw was the guest on the Charlie Rose show. Their conversation included the following exchange:

Rose: I don't know what Barack Obama's world view is. Brokaw: No, I don't either. Rose: I don't know where he really sees where China is. Brokaw: We don't know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy. Rose: I don't really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him? Brokaw: Yeah, it's an interesting question. Rose: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama? Brokaw: There's a lot about him we don't know.

This admission by two prominent representatives of the media is stunning for at least two reasons. The first stunner is how anyone at their level could be so atrociously derelict in their professional responsibilities. The second is that they were so casual and nonchalant in admitting what they hadn't done. Obviously their attitude was so common among the crowd they run with that they were totally oblivious as to how bad they sounded. They sounded like innocent bystanders watching one of the most disastrous media breakdowns in the history of the country.

Why are so many in and out of the media still in deep denial about how grossly incompetent Obama is? The media is totally invested in the outcome of the Obama presidency. Their identification with his success destroys their objectivity and judgment. They have melded their identities with Obama's and that has resulted in their becoming pathetic sycophants. They got Obama elected and now they have prostituted themselves by covering for his incompetence.

Current events are evaluated by the media not by how they will affect the country, but rather by how they will affect Obama. His importance has been raised above all else. Nothing else matters. That's sick.

Liberals live in fear of anyone thinking they're racists. That fear makes those in the media unable to do their jobs. It paralyzes them. When we have a liberal black president they become frozen in place. Consequently, we no longer have a free press, but rather a paralyzed press.

The Hollywood left was one of the most vocal and vociferous opponents of the Iraq war. They have said almost nothing about Obama's military threats against Syria. When asked about that difference the Hollywood left makes lame excuses such as their organized protests wouldn't have any effect anyway.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, "Another reason some Hollywood progressives have been reticent to speak out against the war in Syria, according to Ed Asner, is fear of being called a racist. 'A lot of people don't want to feel anti-black by being opposed to Obama,' he said." So it's okay to sell out your principles if standing up for them would make you feel uncomfortable? Pathetic.

The race obsession raises the question, why is race so overwhelmingly important to liberals? I've never heard any of them explain why Obama's skin color is so important. Electing a black person as president was supposed to reduce and ameliorate racism. Has it? Why, exactly, did they think it would? When they decided to make their big investment in Obama they apparently did not think through what they were doing.

For whatever reason liberals have intense racial guilt. How do you spell guilt relief? Support and vote for a black candidate for president. It was a get-out-of-guilt-jail-free card.

America is not the most racist nation in the world, but it seems to be the most race-conscious and race-obsessed nation. Is it healthy to make race so monumentally important? Is that how we get past judging a person by the color of his skin?

Barack Obama is the ultimate and most disastrous application of "affirmative action." Just as affirmative action in college admissions results in tragic mismatches for minority students, Obama is a colossal mismatch for the White House.

Affirmative action is institutionalized racism, just as much as Jim Crow laws and South African apartheid were racist. In regard to the amount of damage done there is no measurable difference among these variations of institutionalized racism. The main difference is that affirmative action is clothed in the garb of pious good intentions. Once again, for liberals it's feelings that matter most.

Obama was a liberals' dream come true. Being black, however, was not his most important entry ticket. Liberals haven't the least bit of tolerance for conservative black politicians. They hate black conservatives more than they hate white conservatives, which is another manifestation of their focus on skin color.

If Obama had been a competent, successful president it conceivably would have reduced prejudice against blacks. To have a positive impact you not only need to be black (or female or gay), you also need to be competent. There is an abundance of competent blacks. Barack Obama just doesn't happen to be one of them.

If electing a black as president means that we can't criticize that president, will we ever want to do so again? Not necessarily. If a black conservative is elected president, the liberal media will not be the least reluctant to criticize him or her. In fact, they will do everything in their power to rip him or her apart.

Barack Obama is having a negative, not positive, impact on the U.S. and the world. He has no love lost for the country he leads. That's not good. He wants to see the country he leads decline, not progress. Sad to say, we're stuck with him and his administration for three and a third more years. It's going to be a test for America's fundamental strength. In the meantime don't expect the media to come to our rescue.

Ron Ross Ph.D. is an economist and author of The Unbeatable Market. He can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.