On a day when BP finally plugged the massive gulf oil leak and a major financial regulatory bill was passed are media outlets giving short shrift to both successes and President Barack Obama's deserved credit for them?

Media Critic Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post thinks so, noting this morning that the president may not be getting the positive attention earned for these and other successes.

" ... with Thursday's Senate vote to approve sweeping new regulation of the banking industry, the president has now delivered on his promise to clean up the Wall Street practices that nearly imploded the economy," Kurtz writes. “How much credit will the media give him? Will this be portrayed as a watershed event? Or will it be over by the weekend, with press attention drifting back to the oil well and the midterms?

”As one indication, the network newscasts I saw led with BP finally plugging the leak (for which the president will get no credit after 87 days, even though he took a hit for the futile efforts early on). The Senate victory got just a few sentences. The Washington press corps is heavily poll-driven. If Obama shot up 10 points next week, everyone would go back and point to the banking bill as a turning point. If not, such legislation tends to become background noise.

“And therein lies the rub. The financial regulation bill may well help protect consumers and limit the possibility of another banking collapse, but the average Joe won't see any tangible benefits right away. The health-care bill, tarred as more Big Government, remains a blur to most folks, and most of the major benefits are delayed for years (though the White House just announced that insurance companies have to cover some preventative tests for free). The stimulus bill undeniably created jobs, but because the unemployment rate is still flirting with 10 percent and long-term joblessness is a big problem, people don't see it that way”

The Christian Science Monitor offers a similar view: “So what does the president gain politically from passing financial reform? Long term, if the reforms are indeed credited with preventing another collapse of the financial system, then history will view Obama and Co. favorably. But it's hard to prove a negative. Short term, Obama gets ... not much.”

But some outlets, such as The Boston Globe, scored the legislation a win for the president: “The bill marks the second major legislative victory for Obama, rivaled only by the hard-fought passage for an overhaul to the nation's health care system earlier this year ... The 2,300-page bill, designed to address the problems that led to the 2008 economic collapse, will be felt in nearly every corner of the financial world, from convenience store owners to Wall Street executives.”