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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (26102)	4/18/2008 10:40:02 AM
From: TideGlider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224718

Oops accidently gave a rec to your stupid post!

To: American Spirit who wrote (26102)	4/18/2008 10:35:50 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224718

Biased journalists cover-up for Obama: >Obama's secret weapon: the media By JOHN F. HARRIS & JIM VANDEHEI \| 4/18/08 politico.com Are journalists not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon? My, oh my, but weren’t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week’s presidential debate. Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner’s personal associations and his electablity. Where was the substance? Where was the balance? Where indeed. Hillary Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining. That’s still a good response now that it is Obama partisans—some of whom are showing up in distressingly inappropriate places—who are doing the whining. The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama. Last fall, when NBC’s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions—a mix of fair and impertinent—he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters. But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC’s performance as journalistically unsound. The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: Preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading. Politico’s top editors draw on their experience at the nation's largest news organizations to pull back the curtain on coverage decisions and the media mindset. This is not to say that ABC’s performance was flawless. There were some weird questions (“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”). There were some questionable production decisions (the camera cutaways to Chelsea Clinton, the stacking of so many process questions in the first 45 minutes.) But there was nothing to justify Tom Shales’s hyperbolic review (“shoddy, despicable performances” by Gibson and Stephanopoulos) in the Washington Post or Greg Mitchell’s in Editor & Publisher (“perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years.”) Others, like Time’s Michael Grunwald, likewise weighed in against ABC. In fact, the balance of political questions (15) to policy questions (13) was more substantive than other debates this year that prompted no deluge of protests. The difference is that this time there were more hard questions for Obama than for Clinton. Moreover, those questions about Jeremiah Wright, about Obama’s association with 1960s radical William Ayers, about apparent contradictions between his past and present views on proven wedge issues like gun control, were entirely in-bounds. If anything they were overdue for a front-runner and likely nominee. If Obama was covered like Clinton is, one feels certain the media focus would not have been on the questions, but on a candidate performance that at times seemed tinny, impatient, and uncertain. The difference seems clear: Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.