If It's Tuesday, It's Boehlert!

How ABC News debunked the Obama "honeymoon" myth:

Poor Jake Tapper.

The ABC News senior White House correspondent was scheduled to appear on Good Morning America on June 23 to discuss the latest results from the network's polling division. The Beltway press had been buzzing for days about President Obama's lagging job approval ratings. Actually, Obama's ratings remained high, in the upper 50s and even into the 60s. In spite of that, the press had shifted the emphasis and announced that the real problem was that Obama's policies were not as popular as Obama the president.

...So what was Tapper to do on GMA? Would he buck the Beltway's beloved narrative about Obama's supposed waning popularity and simply report the news of the ABC poll: a 65 percent job approval rating? Or would Tapper spin away and emphasize that trouble loomed for the Democrat in the White House?

You guessed it: Tapper spun hard and stuck with the Beltway's preferred "yes, but" story line: Yes, Obama is (very) popular, but people have some doubts about his policies. Tapper simply refused to allow Obama's nearly unprecedented job approval numbers to get in the way of the story he wanted to tell about Obama's "sinking numbers," which, believe it or not, was part of the on-screen text that appeared during Tapper's report on GMA. ("Make or Break? President Sees Sinking Numbers," to be exact.) Yes, sinking numbers for a report on Obama's approval rating, which hovered at 65 percent, a mark his immediate predecessor could have only dreamed of five months into his first term. And, of course, an approval rating that nearly doubled Bush's when he limped out of office in January.

But as Media Matters' Jamison Foser recently noted, a White House approval rating in the mid-60s is suddenly a bad thing from the press' perspective.

Read the whole thing here.