More thoughts on the media from PressThink.
Who enthroned Dean and named him the front-runner? By what criteria can journalists claim he has been dealt a serious blow or dethroned? Who vaunted his grass-roots movement, and who characterized his position as “near-invincible”? (By what criteria of invincibility?) Who decides that New Hampshire is a critical test for Dean, but not others? Who will decide whether Dean passes it? Who pitted Dean’s organizational prowess against Kerry’s and Edward’s “message and momentum”? Who says – and exactly what does it mean to say things this way – that voters “began” to take a “more serious look” at “all the candidates” in the last two weeks? (What had they been doing in earlier weeks? Looking facetiously, or at only some candidates, or not at all?) And who has the prerogative to describe the candidacy of a former governor as an insurgency and the candidacy of a first-term senator, taking on the same political establishment, as conventional politics?We know the answer: The campaign press corps. But the campaign press corps’ stories citing all these factors, causes, dynamics and developments never mentions the centrality of the campaign press corps in picking what counts and doesn’t count in explaining--or explaining away--political reality. The campaign press corps pretends it doesn’t exist, except to observe and explain. It pretends it is a political innocent.
That was written by Cole Campbell, former editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I'd say his perspective is fairly credible, wouldn't you? He came to those questions by virtue of reading the Washington Post's Iowa coverage the day after the results were final. Read the comments to that post, too; PressThink is widely read by members of the press, and they're not shy about commenting.
The thing that annoys me the most about the press is the pretense that it puts up, as Campbell says; reporters and editors surely know that they are players, so why pretend otherwise? Language alone can be powerful; by now many people believe that Howard Dean was "angry" when he recited that list of primary states, simply because the press has said so over and over again. I've heard it called a "meltdown;" as I've said elsewhere, I can only conclude that no member of the press calling it that was ever on a sports team where the coach tried to boost the team up after a defeat. The first time I saw that video I immediately recognized what Dean was doing; why did the national press not do the same?
Because it has its own agenda. Frontrunners need to be knocked down, in order to make better copy.
Posted by Linkmeister at January 24, 2004 03:51 PM