For those who have an interest in how the press covers political campaigns, I've pointed you to CampaignDesk and FactCheck in the past; I'd be remiss if I didn't also remind you of PressThink, particularly this post, which discusses the apparent recovery of the institutional voice (using its "reputational capital," Jay Rosen calls it) in the recent WaPo article about the Bush campaign's abundance of negative ads. Rosen approves, and so do I. If a candidate lies and the press knows it, the press should say so. If the candidate tells the truth, the press should say that too.
Reputational capital is an interesting concept; the NYT bills itself as "the paper of record," and it wants to be just that. Sometimes it lives up to that goal, sometimes it doesn't. The WaPo has a certain cachet for those of us old enough to remember its Watergate coverage, but its lack of critical thinking about the Whitewater business and the leadup to war in Iraq has tarnished that image, at least for me. Any outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch (the NY Post, Fox News, and a zillion others) leads me to look for an agenda which may slant the coverage; I might even be predisposed to find a slant where there may be none. It carries over to the blogging world, too; if I see something at Talking Points Memo or Kevin Drum's Political Animal I'm liable to believe it a little more than if I see it at some site I've never heard of. Even links can have a rep; if I'm referred somewhere from a site I consider credible I'm more likely to trust the information than if I find it through Google or whatever.
In this month of commencement speeches, I guess what I'm saying is one should always remember those critical thinking skills the teachers tried to instill back in high school.
Posted by Linkmeister at June 5, 2004 10:15 AM