Monday, October 25, 2004
Annoy the Media...
In 1992, bumper stickers appeared on the cars of those who supported Bush-Quayle that stated: "ANNOY THE MEDIA, ELECT BUSH." The reason was that an incumbent president, with stratospheric approval ratings, was running in a tight election for his political life. And the media that was covering him was far different from the toothless tigers that followed his campaign around in 1988. As Tom Rosensteil argues in his book, "Strange Bedfellows," 1988 was a low point in the media's obligation to be a watchdog during elections, admitting that they had been handled by a political campaign in a way that was detrimental to the other campaign. In 1992, no more. Hence the media did not simply refuse to read from Republican script, and they often covered other voices to check the facts coming from the Bush-Quayle campaign.
The bumper sticker was meant to fire the base, stretching back to Spiro Agnew's charge of the "nattering nabobs of negativism." The argument--the media hate Republicans and will do whatever necessary to see they are kept out of political office.
Fast forward 12 years and what do we see a week before the election--the media hate Republicans and will do whatever it can to keep George W. Bush from being elected.
In a piece by Diana West in "The Washington Times" erects the charge. In it she drudges up the connection of Kerry with CBS-CNN-New York Times, as well as Ted Koppel who went to Vietnam to contradict the lies of the Swift Boat liars recent round of charges.
But she is not alone. When the President found that "some" of his lies were being fact checked, his spokesperson said:
"The Bush campaign should be able to make an argument without having it reflexively dismissed as distorted or inaccurate by the biggest newspapers in the country."
So when the President lies, it shouldn't be the press's job to challenge it? As if it really is doing in the first place?
Other instances of bias comes in the much ballyhooed memo written by Mark Halperin in which he argues that objectivity does not mean that two distortions should be pitched as balanced. If one campaign is telling whoppers while the other is fudging around the edges, then the focus should be disproportionately on the candidate telling the whopper. So egregious was this, according to conservatives, that Frontpage decided it had to do a full blown character dissection, starting from birth, of Halperin and how he became a liberal while still in diapers. Don't believe me?
"Mark Halperin?s idea of what is right may be what is Left. He was born in 1965 in Bethesda, Maryland, the red-diaper baby of hard-Left-connected controversial foreign policy specialist Morton Halperin. This fact reveals an entire Left-spin universe in which Mark grew up exposed to his father?s comrades and radical ideas."
But Halperin's point was not to pile on Republicans. It was to criticize the central problem of objectivity as a norm or reporting. Equal weight should not be given to two objects that are fundamentally unequal. At least "Fox News" has figured that out.
But back to my point. In a close election, when every voter counts, the campaigns need to do everything possible to rally the base in the way one squeezes a lemon for lemonade. And one way to do that is to throw the old tried and true--annoy the media, vote Bush.
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The bumper sticker was meant to fire the base, stretching back to Spiro Agnew's charge of the "nattering nabobs of negativism." The argument--the media hate Republicans and will do whatever necessary to see they are kept out of political office.
Fast forward 12 years and what do we see a week before the election--the media hate Republicans and will do whatever it can to keep George W. Bush from being elected.
In a piece by Diana West in "The Washington Times" erects the charge. In it she drudges up the connection of Kerry with CBS-CNN-New York Times, as well as Ted Koppel who went to Vietnam to contradict the lies of the Swift Boat liars recent round of charges.
But she is not alone. When the President found that "some" of his lies were being fact checked, his spokesperson said:
"The Bush campaign should be able to make an argument without having it reflexively dismissed as distorted or inaccurate by the biggest newspapers in the country."
So when the President lies, it shouldn't be the press's job to challenge it? As if it really is doing in the first place?
Other instances of bias comes in the much ballyhooed memo written by Mark Halperin in which he argues that objectivity does not mean that two distortions should be pitched as balanced. If one campaign is telling whoppers while the other is fudging around the edges, then the focus should be disproportionately on the candidate telling the whopper. So egregious was this, according to conservatives, that Frontpage decided it had to do a full blown character dissection, starting from birth, of Halperin and how he became a liberal while still in diapers. Don't believe me?
"Mark Halperin?s idea of what is right may be what is Left. He was born in 1965 in Bethesda, Maryland, the red-diaper baby of hard-Left-connected controversial foreign policy specialist Morton Halperin. This fact reveals an entire Left-spin universe in which Mark grew up exposed to his father?s comrades and radical ideas."
But Halperin's point was not to pile on Republicans. It was to criticize the central problem of objectivity as a norm or reporting. Equal weight should not be given to two objects that are fundamentally unequal. At least "Fox News" has figured that out.
But back to my point. In a close election, when every voter counts, the campaigns need to do everything possible to rally the base in the way one squeezes a lemon for lemonade. And one way to do that is to throw the old tried and true--annoy the media, vote Bush.
