To the extent that there was conflict between Obama and the media, I don’t think “business interests” played the decisive role in the media’s hostility.
I well, uh, am personally familiar with media, and I don’t see reporters and editors as automatons who slavishly take marching orders/follow the dictates of their corporate overlords. If there was hostility between Obama and the media, it wasn’t because the media led some kind of organized campaign to spin a narrative to serve the interests of big business. It was because reporters and the Obama press team had goals that were broadly conflicting but occasionally overlap. The Obama admin was trying to make itself look as good as possible by making public info that made it look good and suppressing info that made it look bad. The press was trying to extract any information it could that was in the public’s interest to know and that would sell papers. The whole thing is very transactional, sometimes very hostile, and ultimately rests on personal relationships; I think you can imagine how it would be personally frustrating to be a reporter, and to work with people who withhold from you what you need to do your job well, and to work as an Obama spokesperson, and to deal with people who are trying to extract information that’ll make your boss look bad. That, to me, seems like the “conflict” Cherlin writes about in his articles, and I have to say, despite his claims to the contrary, it seems more typical than atypical of media treatment of the president. (And it’s probably more desirable than the alternative. A press secretary may wax nostalgic about “comity” between the media and the administration, but what he really wants is for the media to fall in line and be more credulous.)