On the one side, you have powerful traditional media who are still trying to "mainstream" this extremist candidate. As an example, look at the Wall Street Journal piece on her that I cited a couple of days ago.
http://online.wsj.com/....
...and on that same side are the media who've always been promoting Bachmann's name, agenda, and career. Namely, Fox and the other blatantly conservative media. This includes national conservative talk radio (far more influential in galvanizing opinion and voting patterns than the "straight new reporting media.) And it includes national evangelical media--which is a hell of a lot more important than most of you think it is.
On the other side of the battle to define Bachmann:
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On the other side of the national battle to define Bachmann:
You've got Olbermann, Maddow, Schulz and the Comedy Channel (whose reach only extends to their liberal and progressive audiences.) They were always on this story. And Mother Jones, but like I say: preaching to the converted.
The big development is: now some of the print journals are starting to get to the heart of the story (she's a political kook with a radical agenda for America.) And that's significant. These media voices reach a broader audience and many of them seem to have woken up to the fact that there's a great big fat juicy story about an extremist becoming a major factor in national politics.
Last month we had a national journal, Rolling Stone, do the first really good critical piece on her in national media. (That's Matt Taibbi.)
http://www.rollingstone.com/....
This week: it's Newsweek, and the New Yorker dealing with the "she's not fit to be president of anything" angle.
The Newsweek piece is important, because it runs a cover that will be seen in supermarkets around the nation. Bachmann supporters are already up in arms because the cover "makes her look crazy." The editors of Newsweek know that as well as anyone: I suspect that they went with a cover that "makes her look crazy" because they know--she is crazy.
But the story inside mostly focuses on Bachmann hypocrisy--not the deeply rooted extremist agenda and ideology stuff that justifies the "she's a nut, the queen of rage" cover.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/....
For the extremist roots and agenda stuff, you've got to go this week's New Yorker--a piece by Ryan Lizza that represents some really fine investigative reporting on what makes Bachmann tick. WARNING: it's written for "the smart kids." It's like literature: it requires you and everyone else to think, which is always a minus in political reporting these days.
http://www.newyorker.com/....
So: all in all, a good week for Rick Perry so far. (Which is ironic, because Perry comes out of the same tradition as Bachmann.)
You see: the problem is that Bachmann is not the only horse in this "extremist right wing supernaturalist stable" that the Christian right and the Council for National Policy have put together over the years. They have a bunch, and if Bachmann is pegged as "too crazy"--there's more ready to go. (Others include Perry and the flailing Tim Pawlenty. Huckabee was "one of them," too--but all the other candidates (including Romney) understand that capturing the support of the Council for National Policy is critical if they want to get the GOP nod and go on to beat Obama.)
And that's the angle that these "Bachmann's too nuts to be president" journals aren't writing about. Not yet, anyway.
But enjoy the media battle to define her. I don't think conservative media will go to the wall for her, if the "nut, liar, and bigot" revelations keep coming out in the print journals. They've got other horses they can run, without so much conspiracy theory/ultraright baggage.