President Barrack Obama was given, according to recent surveys, the best pre-election press in recent memory. He was, in the words of  Ken Auletta of the New Yorker, “the object of near veneration, possessed of a persona and a campaign that were irresistibly compelling to all but his rivals and the right-wing press. Time, for example, saw fit to put Obama on its cover six times in 11 months”.

It’s different now: Auletta goes on, “But now that the President has rolled out his ambitious initiatives – in health care, economic rescue plans, Afghanistan and education – he bristles at the way he is treated”.

He has bristled publicly, some months ago. Giving an address at the memorial service for Walter Cronkite – attended by hundreds of journalists, he paid tribute to Cronkite’s status as “the most trusted man in America”, but added:

“It's a standard that's a little bit harder to find today. We know that this is a difficult time for journalism. Even as appetites for news and information grow, newsrooms are closing. Despite the big stories of our era, serious journalists find themselves all too often without a beat. Just as the news cycle has shrunk, so has the bottom line.

"And too often, we fill that void with instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that Walter disdained, rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed. ‘What happened today?’ is replaced with ‘Who won today?’ The public debate cheapens. The public trust falters. We fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should – and that has real consequences in our own lives and in the life of our nation. We seem stuck with a choice between what cuts to our bottom line and what harms us as a society. Which price is higher to pay? Which cost is harder to bear?

"‘This democracy,’ Walter said, ‘cannot function without a reasonably well-informed electorate.’ That's why the honest, objective, meticulous reporting that so many of you pursue with the same zeal that Walter did is so vital to our democracy and our society: Our future depends on it.”

Blaming the messenger? Possible in September, when the clouds were gathering: impossible now, after the “Kennedy seat” returned a Republican. The extraordinary aggression of the right-wing chat shows and phone-ins, which have inspired the Tea Party movement and helped organise it, must play a role; and the suborning of journalism to the pursuit of made-up stories and media stunts another.

But the swooning of much of the American and nearly all of the foreign media over Obama as he emerged as the most powerful candidate was bound to stimulate a reaction. Then, and even now – see the tributes to Obama in the past two weeks, including an extraordinary hagiography on his route to power on BBC2 on Saturday 16 January – the conflation between joy expressed at the first black US president and a sober analysis of his governance still goes on. It was a point I made at a self-congratulatory breakfast organised by the BBC on their Obama coverage a year ago – to widespread disapproval.

It does Obama a very large disfavour. He is not a black president – he’s made that clear – he’s an American president. The more the western media congratulate their citizens for having elected a black (actually half white) man, the more they will miss the story. Time to junk it. In the end, what’s not self-congratulation is condescension.