Media Matters; by Jamison Foser
In the days leading up to the October 30 Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia, you could hardly turn on the television or read a newspaper without encountering a reference to the "inevitability" of Hillary Clinton's bid for her party's nomination. The Chicago Tribune called her campaign "the inevitability express"; Sean Hannity declared that "t appears Hillary is the inevitable nominee for the Democrats"; The Washington Post referred to her "fortified sense of inevitability"; Tucker Carlson added that "Hillary is inevitable. Everybody is on her side. You can't stop her, don't bother even to try."
The hype all seemed too silly to be sincere: Clinton's opponents for the Democratic nomination include Barack Obama, who has been electrifying audiences since his breakthrough keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention and who has raised more than $80 million, and John Edwards, the party's 2004 vice presidential nominee -- not to mention a field that includes at least two other candidates who would likely be among the front-runners in any other year. Against such a field, it seems laughable to declare any candidate the "inevitable" victor two months before the first vote is cast.
So what was all that talk about "inevitability" really about?
Maybe it reflected the impression the Clinton campaign itself was trying to create; political reporters and pundits have long ascribed that strategy to the campaign even as candidate and staff insisted they weren't taking anything for granted.
But maybe it was something else. Take a look at how some of the nation's most influential journalists have described their profession in the past:
Gloria Borger: "We take people to the top of the mountain and then once we get them to the top of the mountain, it's our job to knock them down." <9/10/06>
Brian Williams: "t does seem true over the years that the news media almost reserve the right to build up and tear down and change their minds and like an underdog." <9/21/00>
Howard Fineman: "We want a race, I suppose. If we have a bias of any kind, it's that we like to see a contest, and we like to see it down the end if we can. And I think that's partly the psychology at play here." <9/21/00>
Many in the media certainly seemed to be building Clinton up prior to the Philadelphia debate -- though it should be noted that they were doing so strictly in a horse-race context. Clinton wasn't getting the kind of fawning media coverage that George W. Bush, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee have enjoyed at various points in recent years. The storyline wasn't that Clinton is a "straight-talker" or someone you'd "want to have a beer with" or an apolitical "maverick" with "folksy charm."
Instead, media built her up as "inevitable."
Were they doing so simply so they could knock her down? Here's The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut, only moments after Tucker Carlson called Clinton "inevitable" on the October 26 edition of MSNBC's Tucker:
KORNBLUT: I have to say we in the media are spoiling for a fight. Usually we are biased in favor of a good tussle at about this point. ... I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere between now and January 3, now that we know that's when the Iowa caucuses are going to be, to see some kind of reverse, some kind of Obama surge or an Edwards surge. Something that is going to knock Hillary down a few pegs. Whether it's a media creation, or something that actually happens on the ground. I would be shocked if there were nothing like that.
The candidates' performance is for others to assess; our interest is in the "media creation" side of things.
Media coverage of Clinton and her campaign has been strikingly negative since the Philadelphia debate. Unlike coverage of her two closest rivals, Obama and Edwards, that negative coverage doesn't seem to have been as concentrated on a few topics or themes.
It all seemed to start with Clinton's performance in that Philadelphia debate, which the media quickly declared to be a "disaster" and talked about seemingly 'round the clock for weeks. Considerably less attention was paid to the fact that her struggles in that debate came in response to false and misleading questions from the debate's moderator, Tim Russert, who misquoted her previous statements as well as his own. The Annenberg Center's nonpartisan FactCheck.org website ultimately agreed that Russert had been "breathtakingly misleading." Russert's fellow journalists -- the ones Anne Kornblut admitted just a few days earlier were "spoiling for a fight" -- responded by praising his performance and ridiculing Clinton.
One of the more contrived Clinton storylines the media have played up in recent weeks is the idea that if she were elected, there would be some grave crisis provoked by having "two presidents" in the White House. This theme seems to have started with Sally Bedell Smith, who invoked the "extraordinary" complications such a situation would present -- something, Smith gravely noted, "people have not focused on" until she brought it to our attention. Smith brought this up again and again on television, radio, and in print while promoting her recent book about Bill and Hillary Clinton, For Love of Politics.
Smith and her book were warmly embraced by much of the media. Chris Matthews welcomed her to Hardball with a friendly "Sally, old buddy"; CBS anchor Harry Smith called her book "meticulous"; and the Houston Chronicle declared it "well-written and detail-rich."
"Meticulous" might not be the best description of Smith's book; as Media Matters detailed this week, For Love Of Politics is filled with errors large and small.
But Sally Bedell Smith wasn't just greeted with open arms by her "old buddy" Chris Matthews; her "two presidents" theme was eagerly repeated by other journalists.
On NBC's Meet the Press, Smith wondered "if we're going to have two presidents in the White House, who's going to be in charge" -- as though the military wouldn't know whom to take orders from. On that same program, Smith told viewers that Bill Clinton "reads all the books and underlines them for her. I mean, she relies on him for so much." On CBS, she suggested that the Clintons are skirting the Constitution: "e have a 22nd Amendment that precludes a president from serving more than two terms, and it might not be too far-fetched to say that this is a sort of end run." In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, she conceded that "Mr. Clinton's return to the West Wing wouldn't directly violate the 22nd Amendment" but darkly warned that it would have "significant implications" nonetheless.
In typical Beltway media fashion, they pretended that it wasn't merely their concern -- no, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary, they insisted that the American people shared this concern.
Still, Smith found more converts to her wholly made-up cause. Author and former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich -- who, to be fair, knows a little something about what Americans don't like -- raised the question on ABC's Good Morning America: "o you really want two presidents in the White House?" Washington Post columnist David Ignatius chimed in with his own projection-filled column asserting that there is a "nagging uneasiness" among voters about the " 'two presidents' issue" -- an uneasiness that is contradicted by polling conducted by his own newspaper, which found that 60 percent of Americans are comfortable with "the idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House."
This week's coverage of Hillary Clinton has prominently featured two storylines that may well have basis in reality, but that have been greatly blown out of proportion.
One is that the Clinton campaign is on the verge of a staff shake-up. Maybe such a shake-up is imminent; maybe it isn't. But one thing is clear: Media attention given to the topic has far outpaced the available evidence.
The story seems to have started with columnist Al Hunt, who wrote on December 10: "It's a good bet that Clinton, encouraged by her husband, is weighing a shakeup, such as bringing in former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta to direct the overall campaign. The question is whether it's too late and too awkward before those first contests, which are to be held in 3 1/2 weeks."
Note that not only did Hunt not reference a single source, he doesn't even report that this is being considered; he simply asserts that "it's a good bet."
Thin stuff -- but this unsourced, speculative throwaway line near the end of Hunt's column was followed two days later by a Newsday article headlined "Clinton insiders question top aide's approach." Nearly 500 words later, Newsday had cited "sources familiar with the situation" and claimed that "some say" and quoted a "top Clinton ally" and relied on the impressively vague "sources say" -- but the newspaper hadn't quoted or paraphrased or even referenced a single named source in support of its portrayal of campaign infighting.
That same day, the New York Daily News ran an article declaring "Bubba to the rescue! Alarmed by his wife's slide in the polls and disarray within her backbiting campaign, a beside-himself Bill Clinton has leaped atop the barricades and is furiously plotting a cure - or coup." According to the Daily News, "Several other Hillary Clinton partisans ... aren't so shy about critiquing the performance of her campaign - and predict a major staff purge is inevitable."
But apparently they are "shy" -- the Daily News, like Newsday and Al Hunt, didn't have a single named source criticizing the performance of the campaign, or predicting (or advocating) a "staff purge."
Finally, the past 24 hours have featured a barrage of news reports claiming that Clinton pollster Mark Penn "on his own brought up" speculation about Obama's teenage drug use during a Thursday appearance on Hardball. The controversy began when Bill Shaheen, a Clinton campaign co-chair, made speculative comments about Obama -- comments the campaign denounced -- and Shaheen stepped down. Penn appeared on Hardball along with Edwards campaign strategist Joe Trippi and Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod. Afterward, MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell asserted that Penn "once again brought up cocaine -- twice" and later claimed that Penn "on his own brought up cocaine." Others, including New York Times reporter Kit Seeyle, similarly suggested that Penn brought the topic up out of the blue.
In fact, Penn didn't bring the topic up; he was responding to a question about it by Chris Matthews. And by the time Penn first spoke, the entire conversation had been about the drug controversy.
None of this by itself -- not Sally Bedell Smith's strange "two presidents" fixation, not a few days of poorly sourced media speculation about a Clinton campaign staff shake-up, not a series of false claims about Mark Penn's comments on Hardball -- comes close to the magnitude of the media smears of Obama's patriotism or relentless portrayal of Edwards as a phony because of his haircuts. But added together, and combined with countless other examples of flawed and negative coverage of Clinton over the past seven weeks, they constitute a suffocating barrage of hostile coverage that may be every bit as damaging.
The media were "spoiling for a fight," Anne Kornblut revealed seven weeks ago. And, as is now clear, they picked one.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200712150003?f=h_top
Are we going to let the CM influence who will become the next president because they want a fight/ratings?
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