Lately, a major point of discussion, especially over the last couple of weeks, is whether the media favors one candidate over another. I’m generally an agnostic on the question, at least as it relates to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I’m far more inclined, however, to suggest news outlets go ridiculously easy on John McCain, and were generally unfair to John Edwards.
But the topic d’ jour, of course, is Obama-Clinton, and the Clinton campaign’s argument that reporters are significantly harsher towards the New York senator than the Democratic frontrunner. Matt Yglesias, an Obama backer who concedes that Obama has gotten “better press” than Clinton, raises an interesting point that I hadn’t seen raised elsewhere.
Still, I think Clinton fans are going more than a little overboard with this monocausal account of the campaign. For one thing, one important exception to this is that if Obama had lost eleven contests in a row, there’s no way he’d still be treated as a viable candidate. Similarly, if Obama had reached a situation where nobody can mathematically see a way for Clinton to catch his lead without altering DNC rules, I seriously doubt the race would continue to be covered as a serious competition.
From another direction, even though the press has often been unfair to Clinton about petty stuff, they have been very willing to go along with the idea that she has a vast experience edge over Obama even though it’s always been unclear what exactly that edge consisted of. On top of that, the country’s most prominent liberal columnist has been pretty consistently attacking Obama for months now. Now, yes, I do think there’s been more BS thrown in her direction and there’s obviously been an “Obama swoon” factor that there’s no equal of on the other side (even Krugman, for example, writes only about his loathing of Obama and his supporters and never says anything good about Clinton) and that’s been a factor in the race. Still, on the central argument of her campaign, Clinton’s been treated reasonably well and the press has actually bent over backwards to keep her in the race under circumstances when almost anyone else would have been written off.
That’s a fairly compelling argument, at least to me.
I’m at a bit of a disadvantage because I avoid television news and don’t really have a reliable sense of how fairly or unfairly broadcast news has treated the candidates. Print media may be skewed in a way that offers an incomplete picture.
But as far as I can tell, Clinton has some very notable, and fairly aggressive, detractors in the traditional media. Chris Matthews, a mainstay of MSNBC’s political coverage, has made little effort to hide his disdain for Hillary Clinton. At the NYT, Paul Krugman has become Obama’s most aggressive and unyielding detractor, but Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich seem to write about their Clinton opposition so much, I’m hard pressed to think of what else they cover in their columns. My sense is that much of the press corps that travels with Clinton holds her in low regard personally, much the same way they did with Gore eight years ago.
But Matt’s point is nevertheless compelling — if Clinton had spent the month of February winning 11 out of 11 contests, building up a strong delegate lead, raising more money than Obama and McCain combined in February, enjoying sizable leads in the national polls, and beating McCain in hypothetical general-election match-ups, I suspect the pressure on Obama to drop out would have been so great, it likely would have forced him from the race already. And yet, those are the exact circumstances facing Clinton, and the media pressure on her is, I’d argue, still fairly mild, at least as it regards her staying in the race.
Plus, is it not fair to say that Obama is giving reporters an interesting story to cover? His success seemed unlikely just a few months ago, and yet, he’s now the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Of course that’s going to generate some positive news coverage — though it seems unlikely to continue once the general election phase of the campaign begins in earnest.
For what it’s worth, the NYT had an interesting item on the larger trend over the weekend.
On the bus ferrying a group of reporters to an appearance by Senator Barack Obama at Ohio State University on Wednesday, Lee Cowan, the NBC reporter assigned to the campaign, was asked the media question of the week: Had journalists like himself been going easier on Mr. Obama than his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?
“I don’t think that it’s kind treatment versus unkind treatment,” Mr. Cowan began, taking issue with the depiction of journalists fawning over Mr. Obama in a “Saturday Night Live” skit last Saturday, a characterization stoked nearly every day since by Mrs. Clinton and her aides.
And yet, Mr. Cowan then described several advantages that he saw Mr. Obama as having over his rival. “He hasn’t been around as long, so there isn’t as much to pick at,” Mr. Cowan said. “He plays everything very cool. He’s not as much of a lightning rod. His personality just doesn’t seem to draw that kind of coverage.”
“Even in the conversations we have as colleagues, there is a sense of trying especially hard not to drink the Kool-Aid,” Mr. Cowan added. “It’s so rapturous, everything around him. All these huge rallies.”
As the two Democratic candidates shuttled between Ohio and Texas this week before Tuesday’s potentially decisive nominating contests, questions over whether reporters were giving each candidate an equally fair shake were thrust into the center of the campaign itself. There were already indications that Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates were finding traction in casting the news media as a conflicted umpire, while also prompting some soul-searching among the reporters themselves.
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter concluded, “People got it into their head that if you say something good about a candidate, you have to say something bad about him, and if you don’t, that’s not fair. What the Clinton partisans wanted was for us to create a phony balance that was at odds with what our eyes were telling us. That’s not the job of a journalist.”
It’s a bit of a tangent, but if reporters keep this adage in mind over the next eight months, I’ll be very impressed.