THE BEAT GOES ON
Cori Dauber
I have said repeatedly that there is no study, no poll, no finding, that looks bad for the press that they aren't capable of rationalizing away.
Evan Thomas of Newsweek is an exception. While walking back his earlier statement that the press coverage of the campaign might be worth as much as 15 points for Kerry/Edwards, he isn't backing off one inch on the overall claim. (His basic theory now is that they would have lost by a greater gap if not for the positive coverage.)
I just watched an interview (11:19am) on MSNBC of Time correspondent Michael Weisskopf by Alex Witt.
The subject is the election, but she wants first to ask about the media coverage, and brings up the CMPA study (pdf here) which found that Kerry received coverage almost twice as positive as the President. (She actually understated it. Kerry actually recieved the most positive coverage ever,(well, since they began tracking) while the President received the most negative coverage since Ronald Reagan.) (Fox, by the way, was different only in that it was highly negative towards Kerry. It was also negative in its coverage of the President. That's covered in CMPA's press release.)
Weisskopf's response? Incumbent president's are "dual hatted" so that they also have their hands on the economy, foreign policy, etc, so that more negative coverage for the incumbent is really quite "common."
His example?
Bill Clinton.
Despite the fact that Clinton would be covered in CMPA's study (a fact he might not have been aware of, I'm not sure she mentioned that to him) it's his rationale that's just priceless -- after all, the press coverage of him was really very negative given the whole Lewinsky thing.
If that was what was impacting their campaign coverage in 1996, that was some prescient press corps. CMPA actually tells us in the same study that in 1996 Clinton got 50% positive coverage compared to 36% positive for Dole, but then, those who came up against Elvis, tend to get body slammed.
Oh, by the way, confronted with this time warp argument, Ms. Witt's response?
"Okay, good answer."
You really just can't make this stuff up. |
