Last night I put up excerpts here from my new piece at Mother Jones picking some of the true lowlights of "traditional" media coverage of the 2008 campaign. It proved popular so I will put up a part II today.
It's all drawn from my new book on the campaign, Why Obama Won, which hails the "new media" (and DailyKos) influence in 2008.
See below for more.
Now a new excerpt:
On April 18, in perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years, ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous focused mainly on small stuff when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health care and mortgage crises, the state of the economy, and other pressing issues had to wait until the midway point. Before then, Obama was pressed to explain (once again) his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his reason for not wearing a flag pin, while Clinton had to answer for her Bosnia trip exaggerations. Obama was also forced during this debate to defend his slim association with former 1960s radical Bill Ayers. This led to Obama's claim that Hillary's husband pardoned two other radicals.
And so on. Gibson only got excited when he complained about anyone daring to raise taxes on his capital gains....
In May, liberal bloggers and commenters at The Washington Post's website rightly criticized a column by syndicated scribe Kathleen Parker that questioned whether Obama "gets America" and if his "DNA" was "full-blooded" enough. But she was only following the footsteps of Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal who raised similar issues three weeks earlier—and was praised by NBC's Brian Williams for a "Pulitzer"-worthy effort.
Noonan had written, "Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem...[H]as he ever gotten misty-eyed over... the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford?"
Henry Ford, by the way, was a vicious anti-Semite, but no matter. Noonan continued: "John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee...Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That's why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel...But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it...[N]o one is questioning his patriotism, they're questioning its content, its fullness." No one? Surely not Peggy Noonan....
In the final days of the campaign, there were too many media infractions to count or cover: from the sensational coverage of the young woman who supported McCain who was supposedly mugged and "branded" by an Obama backer (a hoax) to the revival of the William Ayers issue. But one moment was memorable.
William Kristol appeared once again on The Daily Show, where host Jon Stewart periodically would ask (rhetorically), "Oh, Bill Kristol, aren't you ever right?" This night, Kristol, in character, predicted a McCain win. When Stewart acted doubtful, Kristol dismissed Stewart for depending on conventional media sources: "You're reading the New York Times too much." Stewart replied, "Bill, you work for the New York Times!"
Later, Stewart got Kristol to say that Obama was not a radical and would probably be a "conventional president" likely to disappoint the left. Stewart then asked, why are you and McCain calling him a dangerous radical if you don't mean it?
It was a question that could have been asked of many others in the media.
Greg Mitchell’s new book, his ninth, is "Why Obama Won" (Sinclair Books). It is the first book on the campaign from a "progressive" perspective.