Eric Boehlert, writing in Salon, is getting a sense of deja vu: he believes the news media is spreading nonsense about Howard Dean in the same way they were spreading nonsense about Al Gore:
Full article here (requires viewing an ad for a free day pass).
Have at it, folks: is Dean really a wild, unelectable, rampaging rogue? Or is the “liberal” media just taking a pre-emptive attack on the guy because he’s at the front of the pack?
Seems like it to me.
“Ooooh, Dean disagrees with the incumbent he’s trying to replace! He’s so angry!”
“Ooooh, Dean has an excellent rating from the NRA and supports free trade! He’s so liberal!”
The news media is hellbent on keeping Bush in office. No doubt largely because of his FCC policies based around encouraging megacorporations to swallow up all their competitors. I mean really, mixed in with the WATCH THE DEMS RUN TO THE LEFT hysteria, has anyone been reminded of the Pubbie primaries last time around?
Oh wait, I guess pointing that out makes me a foaming at the mouth radical.
Another “foaming at the mouth liberal” here, but one who voted for Bush the Elder once. I am agreement with the laigle and rjung.
It was obvious to any reasonably impartial observer that Gore was being held to standards of accuracy, knowledge, and statesmanship that were far more demanding that was what expected of Bush. Gore’s ideas were nitpicked in the media far more than Bush’s were. Liberal media bias, huh? Bollocks.
Bush spouted incoherent, rambling, and ill-formed crap, but [almost] everyone [in the media] said he won the debates because he came across as more personable than Gore.
:smack:
It certainly wasn’t because Bush answered any questions with any kind of detail or knowledge whatsoever.
He does seem to be pandering to every whim in the Democratic party that will get him support. In one breath hes talking about the huge deficit and in another hes going on and on about pumping more money into this program or that program while proclaiming himself a economic conservative. Everything he says seems like rhetoric clearly intended to get a vote.
I’ve noticed that Clark seems to be doing the opposite. He shies away from the rhetoric and has huge detailed plans laid out all over the place, things you’d expect to see by September or so, not in the primaries. He gets derided for being realistic about what needs to be done instead of just spouting off “BUSH BAD TAX CUTS BAD WAR BAD”.
I don’t want to see Bush in office but I’m very hesitant to support Howard Dean unless he fleshes out a much more coherent plan for the country.
I suppose the sensible thing to do is ask the media, if you can get Dubya’s cock out of their mouths long enough to get an answer out of 'em.
That would be an emphatic “Yes” to the OP.
And it is the reasoned and balanced opinions like yours that matter!
It was quite remarkable how W’s handlers (with the willing media) managed to use his “unsophisticated” image to reduce expectations of knowledge.
Remember when that reporter stumped W asking him who was leader of some country? That should have immediately disqualified a candidate for the post of President, but everyone was like “aw shucks, he’s a regular dumbass guy like me! Cool!”.
Taking a break from paranoia:
The news media have a vested interest in a close race. For awhile there, it looked like Dean was going to pull away. Every day the race goes on is another day of juicy attacks by or against candidates, new polls, etc.
Or they just felt that not knowing a bit of trivia wasn’t important. How many people really know the names of every single world leader off the top of their head?
As someone who loathes Bush and is not shy about my enthusiasm for Dean, I have to say that I agree with furt. Bush is such a tragically third-rate candidate that the media had to handicap him by wrecking Gore. If Bush is perceived as an imbecile who’s unfit and unqualified for the job, then where’s the story? Likewise, if the media spends all its time on policy positions, it would wind up talking positively or negatively about Clark or Dean but would have nothing to say about Bush except that he doesn’t seem to have a handle on what he’s doing. There’d be no story, Bush would lose credibility, and the right wing would start up with this “liberal media” crap again.
I think enough voters like Dean to see through the “angry” fabrication, or at least they’ll feel that it doesn’t matter. I’d like to think that anyone who would vote for a candidate just because he or she seems like a good chum though not necessarily an effective administrator would be embarrassed to admit it. But I suppose that reaction happens more often than is noted.
The fact is that while Iowa is close at this writing, polls show that Dean is leading in New Hampshire while the media report Dean’s lead as “rapidly evaporating.” Um… he still has more than a ten-point lead over Clark there; I wouldn’t say that means it’s “evaporating.” But if it’s “evaporating,” that’s a more exciting story, isn’t it?
Frankly, I’d rather see boring presidential races than this kind of snow job. But really: considering that Bush wrecked our economy, has made the United States loathed by more than half the world, and has actively driven this country toward tolerating the establishment of religion, shouldn’t everyone be angry? (Well, apart from rich, isolationist religious zealots, I mean. But you knew that.)
I sometimes wonder whether this isn’t also what is responsible for the difference in media coverage between Gore and Dean on the one hand and GW on the other. Sometimes I think that the media folks tend to be won over by nice folks like Bush and intimidated by somewhat more stand-offish policy-wonks like Gore.
I don’t know if this is the case or not…But after listening to Gore’s speech today on the environment and comparing it to just about any speech by Bush, you just can’t help but be struck by the difference. I mean, Gore isn’t perfect…He’s certainly a politician and driven to rhetorical excess but, god, it makes me hunger for a speech actually filled with a little bit of thought and intelligence rather than just rhetoric and Orwellian semantic abuse! I really do have to feel bad for people like O’Neill who, although he has his faults for sure, really wanted to having engaging and fair-ranging policy discussions in the White House and found that sorely lacking.
Oh right, while Dean was lieutenant governor and governor of Vermont, he lived on a farm. :rolleyes:
Do you folks realize how silly this sounds? Every time Dean tells a whopper and the media reports it, you scream “Bias!”
Remember when Dean said he was having trouble “breaking into the country club” of established candidates? This was right after his son was arrested for trying to break into a country club to steal. You don’t remember that? Maybe because the nasty, biased media, who are out to get Dean, didn’t cover it.
Calling it unfair every time the media can’t bring themselves to paper over every gaffe from the front-runner is ridiculous. It’s a political campaign. It’s what happens to the front-runner. It’s like Gephardt pointing out that Dean is claiming he is going to close tax loopholes for corporations, when he created nice big ones for them while he was governing Vermont.
If you are expecting the media to treat Dean with kid gloves, get used to disappointment. Salon can whine from now to November, it doesn’t mean they have a point.
Regards,
Shodan
So, let’s get this staright. The “media” is in a conspiracy to wreck Dean’s candidacy? Do you know how silly that sounds? He’s being attacked by the other Dem candidates. If you’ve seen any of the recent debates, they are going after him like hungry jackals. The media doesn’t need to do this. As the purported front-runner, he’s got a bullseye on his back. This would happen to anyone.
And with Dean picking up the endorsements of Rob Reiner and Martin Sheen, he won’t need anyone else’s help to run his candidacy into the ground. That’ll send mainstream Democrats running for the grown-up candidates real fast.
Furt’s got it right.
It’s not that there’s a concerted effort to bring down Dean with attacks and bad coverage. It’s that as a reporter you go out there to get a story. And your editor is damn well expecting it to NOT be the story everyone else has. So you go looking for something different. Since the campaign is always spinning positive you look for something negative. And it’s easier, too! Woo, bonus!
Toss in the fact that conflict is inherently more interesting to the public than fuzzy bunnies and everyone getting along and there’s a strong incentive for negative coverage.
And also factor in the fact that the media sometimes seems designed to build up and then destroy and Dean gets positive coverage as the ‘plucky outsider not ashamed to speak his mind’ as he climbs and then he becomes the ‘loud-mouthed arrogant frontrunner’ when he’s on top.
And since we’re on conspiracy theories, let’s not forget that we’ve got the eeeeeeevil Clintons (mwua-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha) manuevering things so that Bush wins in '04 and Hillary has a clean shot at it in '08. Isn’t that one reason they “tricked” Clark into running? 
I hate to do this, since I’m liberal as hell, and wish Howard Dean all the best, but…
There is no media conspiracy. I deride conservatives when they start up their ‘liberal media’ crap, and it’s just as silly when the left say it. The media is interested in getting the story that’ll attract the most readers/viewers/listeners. It’s a diverse, gigantic collection of unrelated companies, writers and editors. If you want to argue that such-and-such a news organisation has a bias, you may have a point. But to blindly tag the media as in favour of one ideology over another reeks of conspiracy theory.
Guys, we can leave this junk to the conservatives?
We could, except that it’s a double-punch: the media gets accused of “liberal bias” by conservatives, but the so-called “liberal media” also propagates highly exaggerated to outright false stories about the “liberal” candidate.
A good site for information about the hatchet job the press performed on Al Gore can be found here. Just search their archives for “love canal,” “love story,” “invented the Internet” and “farm chores.”
The Daily Howler site also illustrates the relatively free pass that Bush has received.
Great, John. Now they have to kill every single person who has read this thread.
I hope you’re happy.
On another note, I agree that Bush has been given a free pass by the media, or at least, some of his more glaring “problems” have been handled relatively gently. Which is surprising, considering how much ammuntition this guy provides them.
If the press were merely looking for a “good story” Bush could provide enough material to provide years’ worth of screaming headlines.
If there really was a “liberal media conspiracy”, Bush would be methaphorically beaten to a bloody pulp every time he opened his mouth instead of the press dutifully reporting his pronouncements as Gospel.
The problem with the press coverage of elections is not that they are too ideological it is that they are lazy. They get an idea about a candidate quickly and then everything subsequently is pressed into that stereotype of the candidate. These stereotypes are often unfair. Thus you get Gore-fabricator, Bush-Dumb, McCain-Straight Talker, Dean-Angry, Kerry-Aloof, etc. This is just the way it works. A good candidate will use it to his advantage like McCain did and bad candidate will let it destroy him as Gore did. Politicians complaining about the media are like farmers complaining about the weather.
One would hope that a person trying to be one of those world leaders would know most of them.
Of course, all he has to do ask Rove or Cheney who he’s about to talk to, and what he’s supposed to say and do and ask for.