The author, who now writes for The Guardian, attacks a rival liberal media outlet, Rolling Stone, for a sycophantic interview with President Obama. His insight and criticism that (mainstream) media serves power is very apt, but he dare not attack the system that has produced this kind of "critical" media. Hence, by framing this and similar reporting as related only to the "Obama age", he is at the outer limit of what the ruling capitalist class will permit to be expressed in liberal media which includes The Guardian. Should he ever stray beyond that boundary he will find himself excommunicated from the church of capitalism, and from all mainstream media. I wonder if he is as naive as this paragraph suggests:
What makes this most ironic, and most destructive, is that this function is the exact antithesis of what media figures claim they perform and what pioneers of press freedom protections envisioned. The political media is designed to be adversarial because it is supposed to serve as a scrutinizing check on the claims of those in power, not serve as worshipful, propagandistic amplifiers of those claims.