Chirpstory - Stories Tagged with michelle

Meanwhile, critics are saying Mrs. Romney should not "get a pass" and instead should get the same news media treatment that First Lady Michelle Obama received when her husband--now President Obama--first ran for President. Some critics even question if the news media have a tendency to treat Mrs. Obama differently because she is Black.

Mrs. Obama’s efforts couldn't have come at a better time than now as women's issues have emerged as a key area of debate in this year's presidential race. The controversy over women’s reproductive rights, in particular, has brought women’s issues to forefront as Republican legislators have begun pushing an ugly, anti-women agenda in recent weeks, and women of all backgrounds, religions, and political persuasions have begun pushing back.

During the conference call, the First Lady is expected to discuss the progress the Obama Administration has made over the past three years and address what goals remain. She is also expected to remind the Obama volunteers of why it is so important to work to get President Obama reelected so that he may build on his list of accomplishments—including signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act—a major step forward for women's equality—and his leadership in passing historic health reform that now gives women access to a wide range of preventive health services, including contraception, mammograms, and well-woman visits, all without a co-pay.

During the month of February, Mrs. Obama has hit the road--both formally and informally--to tout both her message of women's fitness and health, and President Obama’s huge list of accomplishments. On yesterday, the First Lady Michelle Obama headlined a major donor fund-raiser lunch for an Obama "Women and Technology" event in Washington before welcoming a group of students to a Blues at the White House event in celebration of Black History Month.

If Twitter activity is any indication, then volunteers across America appear to be excited about the First Lady’s anticipated participation in the Women for Obama conference call and house parties.

Of course, the initial false "news" story spread throughout our nation's news media a little over a week ago with all the furor of an uncontainable wildfire. Conservative radio and television broadcasters ran with the story and used it as another personal attack against Mrs. Obama. Tabloids had a field day. 'Legitimate' newspapers and cable news networks lead with attention-grabbing headlines. Even the Whitehouse press corp put pressure on President's Obama's press secretary to prove that the rumor was false.

Now, just one week following the national hoopla, The Telegraph, the newspaper that started the false claim, wants everyone to simply accept its correction to a story it knew to be false. What's more disheartening, however, is the deafening silence we've heard from our nation's own 'legitimate' news media who have failed to denounce The Telegraph's claim--or at least to not give credence to it--even before this week's admission.

Unfortunatley, our news media's silence teaches a dangerous lesson to young people hoping to seek a career in journalism, a profession once heralded as honorable. With our Fourth Estate today, it seems, fairness and truth mean nothing anymore--sensationalism means everything.

As someone who once spent a short stint in the newspaper business, let me add this: When the news hounds of our Fourth Estate resort to 'sniffing out' the First Lady's underwear, well, let's just say journalism has reached an all-time low in America.

By the day's end last Thursday, Mrs. Obama had garnered close to a quarter of a million followers--a number that utlimately moved her past one of her husband's chief political rivals, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. To date, Romney has 262,916 followers--almost a hundred thousand followers shy of the 349,026 followers and counting that Mrs. Obama had gained by the end of Monday, MLK Day.

Of course, the First Lady who insists she has no intentions of ever being a politician or a celebrity has quite a ways to go to compete with her husband's Twitter numbers. To date, President Obama has 11,957,135 Twitter followers. With close to 12 million followers, the President surpasses all his political opponents combined and remains on the Top Ten list of the most followed people in the world on Twitter.

On her debut, Michelle Obama clearly out classed an author whose name shall not be mentioned who recently appeared on Twitter promoting her controversial biography of the Obamas. The journalist who recently turned book author drew tremendous pushback on Twitter during the week for questionable and unsubstantiated details included in the book. Meanwhile, in a three-part, wide-ranging interview with "CBS This Morning," Mrs. Obama graciously refuted some of the excerpts from the book as untruths and exaggerations.

Here's a summary of the responses from Twitter commenters who were among the first to put out the welcome mat for their beloved "Michelle" on lastThursday. Although Mrs. Obama received thousands of tweets over the course of the week, only those tweets using the phrase "welcome @michelle obama" are included in this story. Comments from her fans and supporters grew by the hundreds of thousands throughout the day and the remainder of the week.