On Monday, Scott McClellan featured a White House press corps that was angry and aggressive. McClellan made his case, as best he could, but reporters were clearly under the impression that the Bush gang was hiding something.
Just one day later, McClellan announced that the story was now done. Reporters should ask no more questions on the subject. It was, as he put it, “time to move on for the American people.” As far as the White House was concerned, on Monday the questions were “legitimate,” but on Tuesday it was old news. Yesterday, McClellan announced, “I think the American people are looking at this and saying, ‘Enough already.'”
McClellan has a point. We’ve seen a bit of media frenzy this week, and for what? It’s not like the Vice President shot an old man in the face and delayed revealing the information to the public. Oh wait….
TNR’s Michelle Cottle had a good piece today concluding that we’ve seen “journalistic overkill” — but it’s been completely justified.
Once again, the American public is disgusted, outraged, and thoroughly fed-up with the media and its absurd hyperventilation over a non-news non-scandal like the vice president of the United States being involved in a garden-variety hunting accident. Nearly a week has gone by since Cheney’s unfortunate misfire, and the reading public, in web postings, e-mails, and old-fashioned snail mail, is growing increasingly heated in its denunciations of the Fourth Estate’s eternal fixation on the trivial. The most commonly heard refrain seems to be: Don’t journalists have anything better to report on?
To these high-minded folks, I can only respond: Are you insane?
As Cottle explained, this week’s media firestorm wasn’t about an ideological bias, it was about a “perfect storm” of political circumstances.
It’s a three-part recipe.
* It’s easy: “It is hardly a secret that Washington journalists tend to prefer a scandal that involves a politician screwing an intern than, say, screwing with the Medicare budget. The latter story not only requires a specialized knowledge base, often involving a complicated brew of figures…. By contrast, Cheney plugging an innocent bystander with birdshot is a topic that even the most brain-dead nutjob with an opinion and a web connection can hold forth on.”
* There was a personal narrative already in place: “In this corner you have Darth Cheney, the scariest man in America, the kind of guy you can imagine killing an Iraqi insurgent or a smart-mouthed TV producer with his bare hands. As such, jokes like Jon Stewart’s parental warning not to let kids go hunting with the VP or “he’ll shoot them in the face” ring too true.”
* Reporters reacted to years of secrecy: “Finally, returning again to the biases of the media, it doesn’t take a p.r. genius to know that journalists have spent the last five years being annoyed by the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy. Political journalists crave access and information the way women crave chocolate. But when it comes to any story that could potentially cast this administration in anything less than a rosy glow, the media know that the Bushies are more likely to start handing out free Snickers bars than straight answers. So for Cheney to follow up his ill-fated shoot by refusing to comment on the matter for several days — even as White House flak Scott McClellan unsuccessfully struggled to make it look as though the VP wasn’t giving everyone the finger — was a move guaranteed to provoke some unflattering coverage.”
Given the circumstances, the coverage didn’t seem overblown at all.