[NYTr] The liberal media: The Presidential Pageant

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Nation - Oct 1, 2007 issue
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071001&s=alterman

The liberal media:

The Presidential Pageant

by Eric Alterman

For the people who cover them for a living, elections are not about
issues or evidence or even truth; they are about the narrative.
Campaigns struggle to define it long before voters are paying
attention--because once the narrative is determined, it's virtually
impervious to revision. This was the case with the "Gore's a liar; Bush
is a dope" story line of the 2000 election. As Margaret Carlson--then
of Time--explained to Don Imus, "You can actually disprove some of what
Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your
calculator, or look at his record in Texas...but it's really easy, and
it's fun, to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore
coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us."

Each year's election narrative is determined by the bigfoot
correspondents and the top tier of the punditocracy and then reinforced
by everyone else. It works best with a conservative spin because of the
recent right-wing takeover of so many of these perches, owing to the
power of Drudge, talk-radio and cable TV. But it is determined in
places like Time, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
To get an idea of how the process works, take a look at the coverage of
John Edwards's campaign. In an alleged news story, "Edwards Talks Tough
on Hedge Funds," Times reporter Leslie Wayne observed, "Mr. Edwards has
made poverty his signature issue, a topic that stands in sharp contrast
to his own $30 million net worth." Wayne and her editors apparently
think there's a "sharp contrast" between a man being wealthy and his
expressing concern for the poor. It's a constant theme of the Edwards
coverage. The Post, for instance, devoted breathless front-page
coverage to the sale of Edwards's house. Bill Hamilton, a Post editor,
defended this decision to the paper's ombudsman by explaining that
Edwards was a "presidential candidate [who] just happens to be a
millionaire who is basing his campaign on a populist appeal to the
common man."

The unmistakable implication is that poor people have no right to
representation in our society. No one mocks Mitt Romney for promoting
policies that protect his more than $250 million net worth. Ditto Rudy
Giuliani, who pocketed more than $16 million last year alone. But as
Fox's Neil Cavuto puts it, "The GOP guys are not pretending to be, you
know, great poor advocates." Since actual poor people are de facto
disqualified from running for President by Congress's refusal to
institute the kind of publicly financed elections that are the rule in
most democracies, the result is that we allow representation only of
the rich, by the rich.

Then there are the haircuts. You won't be surprised to hear that the
fact that John Edwards got a couple of expensive haircuts has
generated, according to Lexis/Nexis, about a thousand "news" stories. I
can't say I've read many of them, but I'd be amazed if any proved more
ridiculous than the 1,220-word "investigation" by the Post's John
Solomon, who notes, "It is some kind of commentary on the state of
American politics that as Edwards has campaigned for president, vice
president and now president again, his hair seems to have attracted as
much attention as, say, his position on health care." You think? In
fact, his hair has gotten far more airtime than his healthcare plan,
but what's odd is Solomon's (and his editors') inability to see that
perhaps a 1,220-word investigation of a haircut might be part of the
problem.

If the point of the stories about Edwards's wealth is to delegitimize
his arguments on behalf of the poor, the haircut obsession is designed
to feminize the candidate and thereby undermine his credentials as
macho-man for President--which are, by the way, those deemed to be the
most important by the media. Ann Coulter calls him a "faggot." Maureen
Dowd, Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough, among many others, use the
term "Breck Girl." The wording is more polite, but the effect is the
same.

Speaking of Dowd, to understand how this process works, it is crucial
to recognize the influence her Times column wields in determining the
substance and contours of the agreed-upon narrative. This is a shame
because while Dowd is a wonderfully felicitous writer, she has little
interest in ideas and none in policy. Her column frequently reads as if
co-written by the Shannen Doherty character in Heathers. Regarding
Gore, she complained in 1999 that he was "so feminized...he's
practically lactating." She attacked him, baselessly, for having
boasted that he was the father of the Internet. She also hyped a false
and defamatory version of Gore's role in inspiring the novel Love
Story. In both cases, Gore was telling the truth as Dowd and company
accused him of lying. But because she was annoyed with the man she
termed a "pious smarty-pants," she wrote, "The vice president's
campaign woes could make a Nashville country song: 'You've been sighin'
and you've been lyin'.'" As my Media Matters colleague Eric Boehlert
notes, Dowd's smarmy and inaccurate attacks on Gore predated (and
presumably inspired) the Republican National Committee's.

Most recently Dowd's peevishness has been directed toward Barack Obama.
She finds the candidate "testy," "irritated," "hung-up," "conflicted"
and "self-consciously pristine." Dowd took it personally when he gave a
Labor Day speech in New Hampshire taking on business-as-usual Beltway
politics. Dowd mocked Obama's "ranting about Washington pundits" by
pointing out that he frequently graces the covers of magazines. This is
quite a trick when you think about it. The media elite put Obama on
magazine covers, and then the same media elite insist he is inauthentic
for having appeared on magazine covers.

Dowd also accuses Obama of preening like a "46-year-old virgin,"
demonstrating "loose" body language and being "hung up on being seen as
thoughtful," while secretly fearing "being seen as 'a dumb blond.'"
Still, it's a kind of progress over her Gore coverage; at least she
didn't accuse him of posing as the model for