Campaign Coverage Is Really Stupid Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

We've had a fascinating media window for the past few weeks.  We go from two straight weeks of relatively comprehensive Iraq coverage with the Petraeus-Crocker hearings and the situation in Basra back to the final stretch of the Pennsylvania primary.

Last week we were debating Iran's role in Iraq, what the Basra offensive means, the pressure that Iraq is putting on our military, and how it is harming our overall national security.  This week we're debating bitterness and orange juice. 

The contrast really puts into stark relief how absolutely moronic campaign coverage has become.  I was totally fixated by this crap between January 1 and March 4.  But I'm done.  The campaign has jumped the shark.  Can we just take a few months off and get back to it in late August.

Comments

[John B.]

It is truly appalling. I just read a transcript on another blog of Chris Matthews bashing Obama because he went into a diner in Indiana and when the proprietor offered him coffee he asked for orange juice instead. That somehow said something bad about him. Matthews later interviewed Bob Casey, an Obama supporter, and noted this faux pas and also Obama's experience last week in a bowling alley (he bowled a 37). He said Obama didn't know how to behave in a diner or a bowling alley, so "what's wrong with your guy?" What gets me is that people actually answer these questions as though they were legitimate. I would have unclipped the lapel mike and left.

[Don Bacon]

Establishment types, which include the Repubs, the corporate media, and most of the Washington Dems, are doing to the outsider Obama what they did to Jimmy Carter thirty years ago. In particular, the Dems destroyed Carter's presidency before the Iranians ever got to him. If the Establishment doesn't get Obama now, they would try again (and probably succeed) to down a President Obama.

So it's not so moronic -- there's a method to their madness. Institutions and relationships, financial and otherwise, must be protected from the upstart who doesn't drink and say the "correct" things. Support for Israel, Christianity, coffee, bowling -- all litmus tests for the next Leader Of The Free World.

[peace]

The media should answer the question at who is really being elitist. I'm tired of the media, discounting what a I believe are the majority of Americans, who don't hunt or profess a fanatical belief in God. Instead the media seems to make rural, gunowning,and godfearing males, who support the establishment's economic and foreign policy, the ones to court. I think it is time for the media to focus on the intellingent voters who pay attention to the issues and thereby report the issuses rather than those who are easily distracted by wedge issues.

[Don Bacon]

Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation, asked: "Who Are They Calling Elitist?" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080414/alterman

How can change advocates properly be called elitist? Of course it's just common sense that only the moneyed elite can be elitist. George Bush, of Harvard, Yale and Andover, is a prime example.

Shades of Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativity" and Rush Limbaugh's "pointy-headed, elitist liberals"

[TW]

AMEN! This post actually helped to clarify for me the real price that the Democratic party is paying for the protracted primary: just by extending the silly season, the campaign at this point demeans everyone associated with it.

You can see it in the three-candidate tracking polls: since early March, McCain's & Clinton's standings haven't changed much & Obama's has dipped a bit. Sure, that reflects the wearing-off of Obama's "siny new" persona to an extent, and Clinton's specific attacks on him as well. But the main dynamic is that a lot of people who were leaning strongly toward a Democrat in late Feb - early March are now on the fence. And that's not, i think, so much a new leeriness of Obama so much as disdain for a Democratic campaign that has stopped talking about how to turn this country around & instead degenerated into a desperate grapple for the nomination. (That's a bit of an overstatement in terms of what the candidates are talking about, but not at all in terms of the media narrative. Campaign coverage will generally tend to highlight that kind of crap anyway because it's so easy to fill air time talking about it - but when the campaign isn't offering much else, that bias will really run hog-wild.)

After Texas-Ohio, when it became clear it was going to drag on for a lot longer, i thought Obama needed to do one (or both) of two things: first, try to shift the tenor & focus of the campaign onto whether Obama or Clinton was best equipped to beat McCain; and second, put a significant new policy proposal on the table that differs substantially from what Clinton has proposed. To do the first, i thought he should have challenged Clinton, not to a debate, but to some form of a side-by-side comparison: each candidate would get an hour or so to give a stand-up speech, in essence a preview of their nomination speech, in which they set out the terms of the campaign they'd run against McCain & make their case against him. Give primary voters a chance to decide, not who's better at bludgeoning their colleague, but who's better at taking the fight to McCain. (If Clinton declined the offer, that would put her in the position of saying quite clearly that her fight with Obama is more important than beating the Republicans, which would doom her.) The second is much harder, but the ongoing slide of the economy & the flare-up of Shiite-on-Shiite fighting in Iraq offer some openings.

Anyway, i wish Obama had done something like that, and there may yet be time (and at any rate, it seems like he's going to pull it off without taking those steps, although i still think the longer this drags on the harder it will be for him to win in the fall). The current nonsense has gone on much too long.

[buy r4ds]

Obama can thank the media for getting him elected. They were really in the tank for him. Most journalists are liberals and they can't help showing their bias. They think the ends justifies the means.Most polls say that people think the media favors the democrats.

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