Journalism

When the Press Has an Agenda:

Look at the primary results Eric Boehlert cites in response to John Dickerson's remarks about Al Gore "struggling" to defeat Bill Bradley in the primaries. Then read Dickerson's piece at Slate.

I don't pretend to have my ear to the ground on potential candidacies. I am, however, in touch with several different constituencies, and what I hear coming out of Washington is not what I hear on the Web.

I have a few problems with Dickerson's piece. First off, Dickerson is not notoriously pro-left, so anything he writes has to be taken with a couple pounds of salt. This paragraph is particularly telling:

Talk about the New Gore also builds upon a structural flaw of his last candidacy: Does he know his own mind? If what we're seeing now is the real Al Gore, why was he so easily swayed last time by advisers and pollsters bearing bad advice? If authenticity is just a political gambit, it's hardly authentic. The Old Gore vs. New Gore angle is likely to become a theme of the coverage if Gore runs. The press will remind us again and again about the 2000 campaign's earth-tone suits and the Great Dane kiss of Tipper at the convention and all the other inauthentic things he did to tailor his behavior to show people what he thought they wanted to see. The press will watch closely for signs of a relapse.

First, Dickerson is obviously playing to the unfortunate mantra that the American electorate doesn't really want to think about issues. Sound bites, photo ops, one sentence resolutions of the world's problems. Of course, Dickerson and journalists like him have contributed probably more than anyone else to this, but it works for them -- it sells papers. It also sells presidential candidates.

And, notice the corollary: a reasoned, "nuanced" analysis is "waffling," which the MSM gleefully picked up from Karl Rove's smear machine. They're still running with it. (My own feeling is that both Gore and Kerry were badly served by their advisers, who all should have been fired. Both men are much more savvy than they came across, but with the press after your ass, it's hard to get that across.)

The "authenticity" angle is a nice ironic touch. The press has touted one of the most bald-faced liars in recent history as "genuine" enough to boost him into the White House, but Dickerson is worried if Gore's "authenticity" is real. I hardly know what to say, except to note that he's already doing his part to frame the next presidential election. This strikes me as a serious problem with the press: they have too much invested at this point in molding public opinion, not enough invested in asking hard questions. The Fourth Estate has turned into another corporate giant -- it's marketing, not news.

This is even more apparent in the treatment of Hillary Clinton. It's not about Clinton's qualifications as a candidate, or whether she has a pragmatic approach to policy issues. It's about Bill. Take a look at this post by Atrios, taking on David Broder (who is on my permanent list of assholes). He cites this post by Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake, which is worth looking at in its entirety. But note this especially:

Here’s how it starts: plant a seed in the NYTimes, and then allow Chris Matthews to provide a little rain to get things going on Hardball. The next thing you know, all the kool kidz are talking about it around the corporate media water cooler. Then the Dean of All Things Acceptable in Washington Journalism comes out to watch it blossom as a rumor weed that we can all cherish from now until 2008, spreading its tendrils among the corporate press in print and on the teevee. And thus, the discussion of the Clinton bedding rituals begins, until this malarky is cemented as a given fact for all the world to know — whether or not it’s true, or even worth discussion at all.

Except for one thing: who the hell cares? I mean really, who cares? Except for the inside, gossip queens of the Beltway, how exactly does this put gas in someone’s tank, keep their kid safe on the battlefield, stop their job from being downsized, or help them pay the balloon payment on their already-ballooning mortgage? What in the hell are these people doing calling this crap "reporting?"

Just to sketch in how this sort of thing works, here's another post by Atrios on David Broder and his own private fantasy land, which you can now find in any major daily:

MR. RUSSERT: David Broder, is it possible for official Washington--the president, Democratic leaders, Republican leaders--to arrive at common ground, a consensus position on Iraq?

MR. DAVID BRODER: It's possible, Tim, but they won't get there by arguing about who did what three years ago. And this whole debate about whether there was just a mistake or misrepresentation or so on is, I think, from the public point of view largely irrelevant. The public's moved past that.

And, as pointed out at Tiny Revolution:

Just days after he said this, a New York Times poll found that 80% of Americans felt it was "very" (56%) or "somewhat" (24%) important for Congress to investigate Bush's use of intelligence on Iraq.

The establishment press is no more bound by reality than the Bush administration is. And, given that, it naturally follows that the issue for the next election is not going to be the failed Bush presidency, the various quagmires that he's led us into with full backing by Congressional Republicans, the jobless "recovery," the complete lack of preparedness for any homeland disaster, natural or man-made, cronyism and corruption in the Republican congress, the erosion of civil liberties, the accretion of power in the executive with the full cooperation of Frist and Hastert, or the endless stream of lies coming out of the White House on everything from Iraq to global warming. The issue will be Hillary Clinton's sex life, because David Broder said so.

And for this we can thank our independent press.