Of course Hillary Clinton won big in West Virginia. She was the only one who campaigned there. I waited and waited for somebody in television-land to take note of that fact, to put it in context, but waited in vain.

The victory was reported as a triumph, although it was also indicated that according to the delegate count it would make little difference to the final result. Missed was the point that Clinton’s victory was garnered without her facing any competition. Perhaps in retrospect Obama should have campaigned in the state, but he chose instead to pursue the man he is likely to face in November, John McCain.

The media bought Clinton’s spin. She argued that she won not because she was the only person who campaigned in the state, but because she was the person who could attract the votes of white working class citizens. (Didn’t Obama win white voters in Wisconsin and North Carolina?) Absent in the discussion was the idea that the West Virginia vote was not so much against Obama as it was in favor of the only candidate who turned up.

In light of this, one could be forgiven for believing that experienced political people at MSNBC and CNN too easily fall prey to spin from one side or the other. Perhaps it’s because of the pressure of time to be filled night after night as the news cycle spins round and round, but if on-air people feel pressed and overwhelmed, perhaps somebody behind the scenes - a producer perhaps? - can be assigned to re-think and assess the information as it arrives.

Another case in point: The McCain campaign invoked a statement by a Hamas spokesman that he would like to see Obama in the White House, suggesting to the McCain people that Obama is soft on terrorists. Obama called the suggestion a “smear,” and added that McCain, who was promising a clean campaign, had “lost his bearings.”

The McCain campaign promptly charged that it was Obama who was fighting dirty, by disparaging McCain’s age. Almost immediately the subject of the discussion was the candidate’s age and whether it was appropriate to bring it forward in a political campaign. All but lost in the talk was the original attempt to paint Obama as a friend of terrorists.

Enormous power resides in the hands of those who are granted air time in this political season. It’s dismaying when the power is so shallowly employed, so apparently mindlessly purveyed, to the detriment of public understanding. Viewers in search of deeper analysis are too often left bitterly disappointed.

Finally, a mainstream columnist has hit hard at the heart of the smarmiest aspect of the Clinton campaign. On Saturday, Bob Herbert quoted Hillary in the New York Times:”There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

Herbert remarked: “There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

“He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

“The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.” And, Herbert added, it is also an insult to whites, many of whom feel one’s color shouldn’t matter.

Is there a sad corollary that it took an African-American columnist to point this out dramatically? Most of the media have been tiptoeing around the subject of race-baiting–bolstering their silence about scurrilous campaign tactics by showing that polling data indicates there is a problem for Obama. Read the rest of this entry »

In the hours before Indiana went slightly for Hillary Clinton and North Carolina went big for Barack Obama, John Harwood of the New York Times was also on MSNBC interviewing — guess who — another reporter for the New York Times, John Broder, who’s been traveling with the Clinton campaign. And if you missed them talking to each other you can see it indefinitely on the New York Times video coverage of the MSNBC interview. Today’s incestuous brigade of reporters talking to other reporters on every conceivable venue is the New Journalism, for good or bad.

In this case, Broder seemed to stumble on a bias that African-Americans could certainly find offensive: “He [Obama] too has a great appeal to the faith voter. However, the Jeremiah Wright thing makes him feel a little bit out of the mainstream – that he comes out of a black religious tradition rather than an American more broadly-based church tradition.” Emphasis of course added. But not calling the black religious tradition “American” is certainly looking at the subject through a white prism — just as the casual and constant use of “Christian” to evoke political goodness ignores Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and spiritual people who don’t belong to an organized faith.

Broder also said that “Jeremiah Wright’s performance recently in Washington gave a lot of voters pause — even supporters of Barrack Obama – that maybe we don’t know as much about this phenom as we thought we did.”

Read the rest of this entry »

“In American politics today, there is almost no serious discussion of how to reconcile the goals of expanded cross-border commerce and Third World development with that of maintaining high and egalitarian living standards in the United States and the other countries with decent social compacts,” Robert Kuttner wrote in The Squandering of America. “The official United States agenda for trade evades the real issues that our economy needs to confront if we are not to lose what remains of social protections, decent wages, and the broader ability of the United States to compete as an advanced economy. If we had a different balance of political power, we would be having an entirely different national conversation.”

A chorus of praise greeted the book. Hendrik Hertzberg called Kuttner, a founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, “a prophet whose time has come”; Barbara Ehrenreich said, “If I could assign one book to all the presidential candidates it would be this one.” Squandering having been published last November, what’s my excuse for writing about it six months later? Confession: I only now have read the book. But I was particularly struck by the continuing relevance for reporters and pundits—starting with those covering the election campaigns—of what Kuttner went on to describe as “[t]he real issues raised by globalization”:

• How can we preserve the instruments of a mixed economy when commerce increasingly crosses borders? Which necessary regulatory functions can best be performed by national governments? Which ones can be accomplished by reciprocal conventions and treaties that set common goals? Which require global institutions of governance, with substantial delegation of sovereignty? Which necessitate conditional, as opposed to open, trade. What other constraints on capital flows are necessary? Read the rest of this entry »

“Don’t be fooled by the numbers” e-mailed a lawyer friend who practices in a hamlet in the mountains of North Carolina. He was talking about Obama’s then-13-point edge in some polls. “Of course folks are going to tell an outsider that race is not a problem but it’s different when they actually vote.”

This pre-Rev. Wright observation by an Obama supporter has a new twist now. The flap-mouthed preacher has become the Poster Boy for white voters looking for a reason to vote against Obama that doesn’t sound as bad as being against a presidential candidate simply because he’s black. Journalists devotedly report their interviews with white male blue-collar workers in North Carolina who now feel free to say they are “troubled” by Wright– not having to say anything about Obama per se.

Most of them probably would have never voted for Obama anyway, but the Wright media avalanche has buried the pitch Obama hoped to make on serious issues. Even some Obama fans murmur that his interview answers are “flat.” What was once seen as the admirable cool of a man comfortable in his own skin now looks like slow-motion reactions and comments.

Obama has not learned to be a true politician–able to form splashy sound bites, or to adopt whatever works for the moment. The latest such example is Clinton’s adoption of McCain’s summer gas-tax holiday. Read the rest of this entry »

On the same Sunday morning that a former Democratic presidential candidate’s spouse ripped into the press for failing the democracy that depends on it, a Democratic presidential candidate blew the opportunity to rip into a prime example of that failure.

“For the last month, news media attention was focused on Pennsylvania and its Democratic primary,” Elizabeth Edwards wrote yesterday in a tough New York Times op-ed headlined, “Bowling 1, Health Care 0.” Given the gargantuan effort, what did we learn?”

Well, the rancor of the campaign was covered. The amount of money spent was covered. But in Pennsylvania, as in the rest of the country this political season, the information about the candidates’ priorities, policies and principles – information that voters will need to choose the next president – too often did not make the cut….

Why? Here’s my guess: The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country’s inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments.

But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture….
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In the much-criticized Pennsylvania debate, a voter challenged Barack Obama in a videotaped comment: “I want to know if you believe in the American flag.”

He doesn’t wear a flag pin, you know.

His former minister takes America to task for its racist past.

His wife says she’s never been so proud of America.

They are all judged and found wanting – when it comes to patriotism.

You can predict the Republican television ads if Obama is John McCain’s opponent: the war hero vs. the vaguely un-American stranger.

The strategy may not be new – but it’s as infuriating as ever.

It’s the default accusation.

Why aren’t black people more patriotic? Why do they hate America?

Get with the program - or else, we are warned.

Or else, what? We’ll prevent you from voting or buying a house in the neighborhood of your choice? Been there, done that.

And it didn’t make a bit of difference.

Since they landed on these shores, many in chains, African Americans have been trying to prove themselves, even when their efforts were met with indifference or hostility.

In every war, blacks have volunteered. Since, Crispus Attucks fell in the Boston Massacre, African Americans have fought for the right to fight for a country that sometimes treated them worse than captured prisoners of war. They did dirty jobs in segregated units, hoping to secure a more secure place in America the Beautiful. Read the rest of this entry »

Considering that he was widely lambasted for his performance as a moderator at the most recent Democratic candidates debate, George Stephanopoulos might have expected to be taken to task at his Sunday talk show. Instead his three colleagues—George Will, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts—closed the circle around him and let him off the hook.

As if to prove once more how incestuous the Washington news business can be, at least when it comes to starring on-air performers, each of the three insisted that the much-criticized questions about gaffes and guilt by association were perfectly acceptable, even using Senator Clinton’s preferred language that “if a candidate (meaning Obama, of course) can’t stand the heat he should get out of the kitchen.”

Nobody asked Stephanopoulos why he and Charlie Gibson spent an entire hour on trivia while serious questions went begging. Nobody pointed out that the debates are there to serve the public’s need to know rather than the narrow interests of news people. What’s more, nobody asked why Stephanopoulos didn’t excuse himself from the role of moderator because he once served in the Clinton White House and his involvement appeared to be a conflict of interest. Read the rest of this entry »

Where is Larry Spivak now that we need him? Alas, Lawrence E. Spivak, creator and founder of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and its best panelist, died in 1994 at the age of 93. As The New York Times said, Spivak was one of the first broadcasters to use panels of reporters (imagine!) to interview national and international leaders.

Spivak was a nagging, terrier-like questioner, but he had credentials. He had been publisher of the American Mercury in some of its best days before founding Meet the Press, first on radio, in 1947. There he remained until 1975. “He saw himself as nothing more than a devil’s advocate,” said the Times. “His style and that of the journalists who regularly appeared on his program stand in sharp contrast to a later generation of television pundits who sometimes use their broadcasting time to express their own opinions.”

Notice the use of the word “pundits” rather than journalists or reporters. Which brings us to the current host of “Meet the Press,” Tim Russert. Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News, and his network sidekick, Chris Matthews, and their competition at ABC, George Stephanopoulos. They are among the leading “television pundits” of this general election campaign and all have come to their lofty, influential, and well-paying places in what is essentially an entertainment medium by way of another non-journalism endeavor, politics.

That may help explain the train wreck of the Philadelphia “debate” between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, as well as the celebrity-style campaign coverage that seems more suited to the National Inquirer or the Jerry Springer show–“let’s see you and him fight.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Watching the candidates for the Democratic nomination at their debate the other night, I caught myself lapsing into the old adversarial journalistic habit of mind. When the ABC interlocutors jabbed at Obama and Senator Clinton then unsheathed her shiv, I wanted Obama to return the favor. He mentioned Clinton’s much-criticized 1992 remark that she preferred to practice law instead of baking cookies, and I thought that at last he was moving in for the kill.

But no. The lesson he drew from her awkward word-choice was that everyone blunders now and then and in fact he understood that what she had said did not accurately reflect who she was. And he offered the instruction gently. Gently!

It was a telling moment. I thought: what manner of man is this? What does it say about the kind of leader he might be? Does he lack the instinct for the jugular, or does he prefer not to make enemies when soft words might prove more persuasive?

The media prattle about inconsequential matters misses the essential question: What do we see and know about these candidates that reveal their character? I recall that, years ago, when I was interviewing Senator Sam Ervin – who had chaired the Watergate hearings that led in part to the resignation of President Nixon – I asked how it was that American voters had elected Nixon in the first place. The Senator answered that the media had ignored early evidence of the candidate’s character, relying on the public relations theme that there was a New Nixon. When we choose a president, Ervin said, there are three things to look for: character, character, and character.
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