Today April 10 I was driving home and had to turn my car radio off. I'd been listening to All Things Considered, and they ran not one but two stories outrageously pimping John McCain.
First they ran a story by Peter Overby relating how McCain and Obama are battling over public financing of their campaigns.
McCain intends to take public funds. He accuses Obama of breaking a promise to do the same. But the cash machine built by the Obama campaign may dwarf the $84 million federal grant that he would get from Washington under public financing.
Except Overby never mentions it's McCain who's breaking the law.
Then there was another piece by David Kestenbaum:
In a three-part series, NPR examines the presidential campaigns as business school case studies — where the bottom line is votes rather than profit.
Ready for this? Obama is like McDonalds; McCain is like Apple Computer or a Mars bar.
Let me begin by saying I listen to NPR because it frequently does good reporting, covers issues in depth, and follows up stories the Traditional Media can't be bothered with these days. That being said, I also find that NPR sometimes proves as bad or worse as the Traditional Media on some stories. These two definitely qualify. If you follow the links, you can hear both pieces as broadcast. Listen for yourself, and go here to tell NPR what you think.
Both of these stories couldn't have been better for John McCain if they'd been deliberately written by his campaign. (In fact, they're probably better than his campaign could have done by itself) Start with the campaign financing story for example. The whole premise of the story is that Obama promised to run with public financing money and the spending limits it imposes if McCain would too, then backpedaled after money started pouring in to his campaign. McCain is a man of principle and Obama is not, obviously - except for one missing detail.
McCain already agreed to take Federal money for public financing for the primaries - and used that as collateral to take out loans to keep his campaign afloat months ago. Taking out those loans on the promise of that funding committed him to accepting limits whether he actually took the Federal money or not.
When the money started rolling in after he locked up the GOP nomination, McCain then when back on his word and has already violated the spending limits he agreed to when he first said he would take public financing. You can listen to the entire piece and not once does Overby mention this, nor the fact that thousands of people are calling on the FEC to bring McCain to account for breaking the law. If you'd like to be one of them, go to Firedoglake which has been on top of this for weeks now. The pdf file there lays out in detail how McCain is breaking the law, and the numbers involved. This is a story the Traditional Media have almost completely ignored - and NPR continues that silence.
You can follow up on the McCain hypocrisy with an interview at Firedoglake by Jane Hamsher of author Cliff Schecter about his book The Real McCain.
The meta-message of the Overby piece is that Obama is a hypocrite while McCain is a man of principle when it comes to campaign finance. This framing is only possible by omitting any mention of McCain's conflict with the law. There's really no excuse for this on Overby's part; he's ended up completely reversing the facts of the matter.
The second story by David Kestenbaum is a marvel of inanity. It's one thing to look for analogies between corporate branding strategies and the way candidates position themselves in the market place for the voters. It's quite another to strain them all out of shape to fit them into a larger frame. The first piece in the series compares Obama and his campaign to junk food;the second paints McCain as equivalent to a company famed for it's iconoclastic best of breed technology or a classic candy bar that periodically goes in and out of fashion, but always retains its essential nature. Whatever valid points may have been raised in either piece, that's the larger meta-message that Kestenbaum is putting out here.
If I were Steve Jobs, I'd definitely be demanding a retraction from Kestenbaum - or equal time for a rebuttal. It's 'ironic' that a story ostensibly about 'branding' goes out of its way to do some branding of its own. I can only anticipate with dread what the promised piece about Hillary Clinton on Friday is going to perpetrate.
A more fitting comparison might be made between McCain and the subprime lending market: started out really hot, collapsed dramatically - and is now being rehabilitated by those who dare not allow anyone to see just how fatally flawed the whole affair is.
Both of these stories demonstrate that NPR is no more immune than the rest of the Traditional Media from the compulsion to unquestioned John McCain worship. Glenn Greenwald had a nice take-down of the traditional media over at Salon back on April 5 that touches on this.
One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can't possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.
By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that's how McCain's rustic "Sedona cabin" -- i.e., his sprawling compound -- came to be).
It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it's this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections.
Go here to tell NPR what you think. It's too important to let this slide.