Media Analysis
A rare glimpse of political reality from the corporate media (TIME):
Oh, let's just admit it: John McCain is a long shot. He's got a heroic personal story, and being white has never hurt a presidential candidate, but on paper 2008 just doesn't look like his year. And considering what's happening off paper, it might be time to ask the question the horse-race-loving media are never supposed to ask: Is McCain a no-shot?
Last week, the McCain campaign's case against Barack Obama went something like this: He's irresponsible when it comes to Iraq, naive when it comes to Iran, and a big-government liberal when it comes to the economy. But now Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has more or less endorsed Obama's plan to withdraw from Iraq, forcing McCain to argue that Maliki didn't really mean it, and even the Bush administration has accepted a "time horizon" for withdrawal, if not a precise "timetable." The Bush administration has also engaged in some diplomatic outreach with Iran, just as Obama has recommended, a severe blow to McCain's efforts to portray Obama's willingness to talk as appeasement. And on the economy, a TIME/Rockefeller Foundation poll found that 82% of the country supports
I guess it's an improvement from 2000, when the media couldn't say "Al Gore invented the Internet!" fast enough. However, you have to wonder if reporting on false, politically motivated rumors just helps them spread more (WaPo):
On the television in his living room, [Jim] Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. [...]
"I think Obama would be a disaster, and there's a lot of reasons," said [Leroy] Pollard, explaining the rumors he had heard about the candidate from friends he goes camping with. "I understand he's from Africa, and that the first thing he's going to do if he gets into office is
Digby says it's started, right on cue:
[In February] I wrote this:
It was only a matter of time before the media began to trivialize Obama and his campaign as a bunch of latte-sipping left-wing hippie elites. That's the 30-year conservative rap on liberals and it's been fully internalized by the MSM and a whole lot of Americans, including some Democrats. When you start to hear the pundits talking about "beer track/wine track" this isn't far behind...
[...] This is a Village meme that has been used over the course of thirty years.(Fifty, if you want to go back to Stevenson.) It has been so internalized among the media elites that the Republicans don't even have to say it out loud anymore. It was inevitable that it would happen. [...]
Nobody should be surprised or unprepared for this by now. I think Obama's campaign people underestimated how this label could be applied to their guy and they allowed it to play out in Pennsylvania in ways that should have been anticipated. But then I have always wondered why Democrats are always off guard every time this hits them.
Here's an interesting exchange: Elizabeth Edwards writes an op-ed in the New York Times blasting the media's refusal (yet again) to cover any issue of substance duringa presidential campaign (snarkily titled "Bowling 1, Health Care 0"). Brian Williams, "liberal news" anchor with NBC, sneers at Edwards and says folks should go read Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal instead (choice quote: "Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem."). And then Glenn Greenwald smacks them both down.
Elizabeth Edwards' Op-Ed critiquing our media's vapidity prompts multiple paragraphs of trite NYT bashing. Peggy Noonan's insistence that Barack Obama's love of America is in question among the Gate 14 crowd (in contrast to the Ultimate Patriot John McCain) — a column that is dumb and disgusting in exactly equal measure — prompts a Pulitzer nomination from our leading News Anchor and deep praise. That's because we have a Liberal Media.
Today the NYTimes published convincing details of the Defense Department's program to shape public opinion on the Iraq war, before and after the invasion of Iraq, by using retired military officers who are authoritative "military analysts" for FOX and other media organizations.
Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what [Torie Clarke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for public affairs] had in mind....a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary....
The Pentagon's regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees....The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments....
An excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Myths of Republican Politics (Huffington Post):
If one examines America's presidential elections beginning in 1980 to the present, what one finds is a consistent and unchanging pattern. The Republican Party dresses up its leaders in all sorts of virtuous personality costumes. The establishment press, driven by the vapid dynamics of high school personality complexes, digests and then promotes that iconography. National elections are dominated by personality imagery and smears and are almost completely bereft of consideration of substantive issues. Worst of all, the personality images that dictate our election outcomes are not just petty, but entirely false, grounded in pure myth.
In every one of these critical aspects, John McCain is perfectly illustrative of the same twisted process that has infected our political discourse and converted our national elections into, using the words of John Harris and Mark Halperin,
Things become very clear when Glenn Greenwald explains them:
The number one rule of the standard establishment journalist is to avoid offending the powerful because the more offense they give, the fewer favors the powerful will do for the journalists. Conversely, and by logical necessity, the more journalists please the powerful, the more favors the powerful will do for them. As [Tucker] Carlson put it: "People don't talk to you when you go out of your way to hurt them as you did." I can't think of any single dynamic that better explains what has happened the last eight years than that one. [...]
Even after the lead-up to Iraq War, eight years of the Bush administration, the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch fiascoes and an endless string of similar incidents, American "journalists" like Carlson are actually proud of the role the American media plays. Newsweek's Richard Wolffe, sitting and chatting with Tony Snow: "the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general."
That's why it won't change and the only real hope is to develop alternatives to it. Serving the politically powerful, functioning as the PR arm of the political establishment, is what they want to do, what they believe they should be doing. The more they do that, the more respectful they are of the politically powerful, the more "standards" they think they have. The success of the American establishment journalist is measured by how many good friends they count among the politically powerful.
And here we all thought they considered their jobs to be reporting the truth.
The front page of the Trib today:
When you read the accompanying story, you learn that investigators have yet to link the case to terrorism in any way.
But hey, if it sells newspapers...
[John] Edwards, [Ron] Paul and [Mike] Huckabee are obviously disparate in significant ways — ideologically, temperamentally, and otherwise. But there is a vital attribute common to those three campaigns that explains the media's scorn: they are all, in their own ways, anti-establishment candidates, meaning they are outside and critical of the system of which national journalists are a critical part, the system which employs and rewards our journalists and forms the base of their identity and outlook. Any candidate who criticizes and opposes that system — not in piecemeal ways but fundamentally — will be, first, ignored and, then, treated as losers by the press. [...]
As Digby notes, Ron Paul is going to raise more money than any Republican candidate this quarter; he just topped the record for most money raised in a single day; and has now exceeded Howard Dean's 2004 quarter total when Dean was at the peak of his online fundraising prowess. Huckabee is now tied for the lead in national polls and is leading in several of the key early states. Yet our establishment media stars continue to sneer at these anti-establishment candidates as though they are aberrational jokes, and there is virtually no serious effort to understand the meaning of their success.
In 2004, the media were basically forced to write about Howard Dean because he was the only candidate who was doing anything interesting. Nonetheless, they made sure everyone knew that the anti-establishment candidate from Vermont was "angry, gaffe-prone and unelectable." Plus ça change.
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