Is it just me, or is the media seeming to be behind Obama? It seems like I hear way more about Obama than Clinton on the NPR news and on the rare occasions I see any television news.
McCain, poor guy, barely gets talked about at all because his primary is already decided.
Amy
__________________ Salt makes mistakes taste great.
I don't know if it's so much that they're getting behind Obama as they're seeing the writing on the wall. They stopped paying a lot of attention to Huckabee as soon as it looked like he was not going to win the nomination. McCain got the attention then, Obama's getting it now. Clinton's old news.
There have been media studies done of positive versus negative stories on the candidates. IIRC, Obama has gotten far more positive coverage than Hillary.
I'm not surprised that NPR News gives more coverage to Obama. Neither Clinton has ever distinguished him/herself as a "liberal" Democrat. They are moderates. They are pragmatists.
They recognized that they could not win elections without attracting moderate voters.
Obama is more liberal than Clinton. He opposed the war from the start, for starters.
Obama's main hope of winning will be in "getting out the vote" from his main constituencies--youth, for example, who have voted in low numbers in the past....
A Democrat can win in the US if higher percentages of registered Democrats vote.
__________________ When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence.
Thomas W. Higginson
The Democrats are getting the most coverage in places like the weekend political shows because their primaries are still a story. McCain isn't excluded, there's just less to say about him. I think this is benefiting him right now, because he's made some gaffes that would probably have sunk a campaign that had the spotlight on it.
Sometimes the best media bias is not having the news stations run your videotape in heavy rotation for 72 hours, like when you show you don't have an appreciation of the difference between shia and sunni because you've been so busy trying to scare people about Iran and al Qaeda.
IT is certainly no secret that Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is a darling of the news media. Reporters routinely attach “maverick,” “straight talker” and “patriot” to him like Homeric epithets. Chris Matthews of MSNBC has even called the press “McCain’s base” — a comment that Mr. McCain himself has jokingly reiterated. The mainstream news media by and large don’t cover Mr. McCain; they canonize him.
When asked on NBC's Meet the Press if McCain's false claim that Iran is training al Qaeda will hurt his presidential candidacy, Chuck Todd referred to the Arizona Senator's cozy relations with the media and admitted that they let him get away scot-free.
"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have." -- Albert Einstein
It's interesting that this discussion should be taking place now, when the Republican nomination is sewed up and the two Democratic contenders are duking it out -- which is the sort of scenario the press loves.
Look at it this way -- the media managed to eliminate John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul simply by not reporting on them. (Somebody on my route home still had a Ron Paul poster up on their back porch until this week. Made me twitch every time my train went by it.)
As for McCain being ignored, let's be realistic about it: considering what's coming out of his mouth lately, that's the best thing the press could do for him. Remember, the press is his main constituency. (Speaking of which, this post by Digby is a very thorough discussion of the press and its St. McCain.)
"Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." -- Jamie Raskin
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
See Amy, I think the evening news is getting behind Hillary. I don't see them as giving Obama the green light. I will say there are more Obama commercials on TV than Hillary, but he can afford them, she can't. I also think she might believe she has PA sewn up, so she doens't need to be active in the media. But that is at the local level, very local, the Philadelphia area.
__________________ Watching TV teaches philosophy.
The way I see it, Obama has such a lead that Hilary will never over come, so I'm not sure why her name is still in the media at all. I think the press has been favoring her, somewhat, because every new way her team decides they want to count "the will of the people" the media pounces on.
To me it's like when EMT's or other medical personel perform CPR on someone they know is dead. They know they can't bring the person back, but it sure makes it feel better for other people involved knowing that these people "did all they could."
Obama has a slight lead. He by no means has the nomination sewed up.
I think the calls for Clinton to concede are a little premature, and I think the scenario of Clinton pulling off a coup at the convention is so much poodle-dip.
"Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." -- Jamie Raskin
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
There was an interesting Michael Barone column up on realclearpolitics.com a few days ago. (He's the political analyst who can tell you county by county how many votes there are and how many are Dems and how many GOP).
Anyway, he saw a scenario in which Hillary got more popular votes than Obama. It isn't possible for Hillary to get more pledged delegates than Obama. At that point, the superdelegates would have to decide which to go by, votes or delegates, in deciding how they would vote.
I think the media are rooting for this scenario for the purpose of ratings. It keeps people interested in the cable shows, the upcoming primaries, and if the decision were made at the convention, the ratings would be sky high.
Over the weekend, it looked like Clinton's supporters were warming up to the idea of her as vice presidential material. I never thought she'd go for that, so I was surprised by folks close to the campaign doing anything more favorable than rejecting it outright when weeks before they'd only talk about VP in the context of Obama as VP.
There just doesn't seem to be much hope of her catching up in delegates, but that doesn't mean the future is clear. She's certainly not Obama's first choice as VP and I have to wonder, after this weekend, if she doesn't want to at least force Obama to pick her as VP or risk losing her supporters.
What kind of concession speech are we going to hear from whomever loses?
"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have." -- Albert Einstein
Is it just me, or is the media seeming to be behind Obama? It seems like I hear way more about Obama than Clinton on the NPR news and on the rare occasions I see any television news.
Hillary Clinton's campaign has always tried to keep the press at arms-length. It's very rare for her to do a press conference and she has the least interaction with the press on the trail. She's tried to break that a couple of times, but most of the time she's relied on making statements at rallies to get in the news and that doesn't give a lot to reporters to use.
(Amy, when you were freelancing how much could you write about someone on the council if they'd never spoke to you one-on-one? You can write what they said in the meetings, maybe add some context if you have the room and cover how both sides spin it - but that's the same story everyone else is reporting, too. Anyone who wants media coverage needs to give them access and something exclusive. Clinton is loathe to do either, and has been from the start of the campaign.)
In addition to that, Clinton has had a really bad two weeks and there are more storms on the horizon. When a politician is going to be asked stuff like "How can you remember something that never happened?", any campaign manager with five working brain cells will keep the candidate as far from the reporters as possible.
Is the media biased towards Obama? I don't know. All of them have had poor coverage in one way or another. (By "poor" I mean coverage that is bad journalism, not reporting that hurts them.) But I don't think there's any movement to punish one at the expense of another. That happens, don't get me wrong, but its just the end-product of a press corps that is too lazy to challenge the basic assumptions that it makes about the candidates.
You can see this in how all three candidates are covered. John McCain is a maverick, a foreign-policy and military pro, a straight-talker and a crusader for clean government. None of this passes even causal scrutiny, but the press is too lazy (or cowardly) to challenge the accepted wisdom of the herd.
Barack Obama is a lightweight because they don't know him, and those kids who turn out by the tens of thousands for his rallies may just be there because of the hip factor. The idea that they would actually care about what was going on and want to do something about it was beyond the pale for our press corps, even after there was record-breaking youth voter turnout in the early primaries.
But no one has benefited from or been victimized by the preconceptions of the DC press more than Hillary Clinton. Yes, she is unfairly painted as Machiavellian, cruel and dishonest. (Though the unfairness of that charge does not apply to some of her senior staff, Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn do leave trails of slime behind them.) But that same media caricature that the Clinton's will find a way to win by any means, no matter how far they are down, is the only thing on earth that has kept Hillary Clinton in this race. No other candidate has ever lost eleven primaries in a row and stayed in. If she had been anyone else her political headstone would have been carved by the press and reported at 5,6 and 11 no later than February 21.
NBC correspondent Kelly O'Donnell on why John McCain says stupid shit like "Why not stay in Iraq for 100 years" and "Iran is supplying Al Qaeda", in addition to his unwavering support for Bush's policies in Iraq:
"He's just too smart."
No kidding, that is a verbatim quote from MSNBC about an hour ago. O'Donnell added that McCain has so many "layers" that when he tries to shorthand with us common folk it sounds wrong, which would mean she's saying that we're too stupid to understand it.
Andrea Mitchell nodded her head approvingly and agreed with O'Donnell.
O'Donnell's not a commentator. She's (supposed to be) the news reporter covering the McCain campaign for NBC and MSNBC.
"Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." -- Jamie Raskin
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
(As my man Curtis used to say, readeveryword if you care at all about the media and this election cycle.)
Quote:
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
"Yoo and torture" - 102 "Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73 "Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16 "Obama and bowling" -- 1,043 "Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted) "Obama and patriotism" - 1,607 "Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079
And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq -- that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight -- has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. "The Clintons are Rich!!!!" will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.
"Media critic" Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama's bowling and eating habits and how that shows he's not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama's bowling was his biggest mistake, a "real doozy."
Obama's bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling "with disastrous consequences." And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time's Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama's "Patriotism Problem," where we learn that "this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what's wrong with America than what's right." He trotted it all out -- the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama's angry, America-hating wife, "his Islamic-sounding name."
Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. They speak for the Regular People, and what the Regular People care about is not Iraq or the looming recession or health care or lobbyist control of our government or anything that would strain the brain of these reporters. What those nice little Regular Folk care about is whether Obama is Regular Folk just like them, whether he can bowl and wants to gorge himself with junk food.
Our nation's coddled, insulated journalist class reaches these conclusions about what Regular Folk think using the most self-referential, self-absorbed thought process imaginable. The proof that the Regular People are interested in these things is that . . . the journalists themselves chatter about it endlessly. In Great American Hypocrites, I described the process as follows in the context of examining the three-week-long media obsession with John Edwards' haircut (to the exclusion of a whole array of revelations about what the government was doing or planning to do) and how they justified that coverage:
Most certainly, the press will pretend to be above it all ("this is not something that we, the sophisticated political journalists, care about, of course"). But they yammer about Drudge-promoted gossip endlessly, and then insist that their own chattering is proof that it is an important story that people care about. And because they conclude that "people" (i.e., them) are concerned with the story, they keep chirping about it, which in turn fuels their belief that the story is important. It is an endless loop of self-referential narcissism -- whatever they endlessly sputter is what "the people" care about, and therefore they must keep harping on it, because their chatter is proof of its importance.
They don't need Drudge to rule their world any longer because they are Matt Drudge now.
Every day, it becomes more difficult to blame George Bush, Dick Cheney and comrades for their seven years (and counting) of crimes, corruption and destruction of our political values. Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as -- all in a couple of weeks time -- it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation's top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama's bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn't you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?
UPDATE: One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can't possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.
By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that's how "McCain's Sedona ranch" -- i.e., his compound -- came to be).
It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it's this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections.
The Klein article is appalling -- to the extent that he even quotes Obama on how great America is and then turns around and comes out with the line about Democrats always talking about what's wrong.
Don't believe a word you read in the papers or see on TV, because it was probably written by the RNC -- not that they have an agenda or anything.
And as much as citizens who are suspect of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we're confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)
Looking at it again, it's one of the funniest things to come out of the press in I don't know how long. I just wish the laughter weren't based in rage.
"Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." -- Jamie Raskin
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
