First, don't you love how Fineman announced he was just a reporter, not an editorial writer, so he was going to keep his personal opinion out of his completely objective analysis that Clinton was just like the conniving Richard Nixon?Read This -- They should be ashamed of themselves.
Saturday Night Live had it right
4 comments:
Makes me tremendously sad.
I agree with most of this article, but not the conclusions you're drawing from it. Yes, the press is absolutely embarrassing in its tendencies to take one sentence out of context and use it to roast a candidate for days. Absolutely, the interview about Obama's secret Muslimness was a travesty. But does it follow that the press has slanted this thing toward Obama? Uh...no.
This same phenomenon has happened to the Obama camp in the same way. Think "bittergate", which went on for a good solid week at a crucial time in the election. Take one word out of what he was saying, and then twist it in a way that no honest person could believe was what he intended.
Did Obama mean that the only reason rural people believed in religion was because of their economic woes? Of course not. He obviously was talking about their voting patterns. Yet as the story went on, that became the analysis more and more. Same phenomenon as with Clinton. Michelle Obama got it too, with that statement about being proud for the first time. Clearly a tired person misspeaking, but used by the media to make some big controversy. And don't forget about the ongoing Reverend Wright mess. Polls have shown that Americans don't think it's worth the coverage it's getting, but that isn't going to stop the media.
Was the news overly cheery on Obama in the beginning of the campaign? I think it probably was. Was it throughout the campaign? No way. If you turn on CNN on any given night, you will see ardent Clinton supporters on every panel, often with the "balance" coming from a Republican, not an Obama supporter. We're talking people who were in the first Clinton administration, who openly push the Clinton camp talking points of the day rather than answer the questions at hand. James Carville, Lanny Davis, Dee Dee Myers...you don't have these kinds of advocates in the media on the Obama side.
So basically, I agree that the media sucks. But the idea of the Clinton double standard is pretty dubious. Don't tell me you never saw this same media behavior with Al Gore, John Kerry or Barack Obama.
A whole week of bad press. Poor Obama.
Ahem...let's go to the research.
http://tinyurl.com/6lv4dp
That's the Pew Research Center saying...
In fact, according to the study, for the first two months of the year, starting just before the Iowa caucuses, the tone of coverage for both was "almost identical," with both getting about twice as many positives in those categories as negatives.
The tougher coverage, the study said, came at Obama's expense as "the narrative about him began to turn more skeptical and indeed became more negative than the coverage of Clinton herself."
The "trajectory" of that coverage "turned against Obama" well before the issues surrounding his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the study found. Instead, it began after Clinton's criticism of the media's allegedly soft Obama coverage during one of the televised debates.
All in all, they say, the coverage was even.
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