While I'm obviously not a Hillary Clinton supporter, I do think that the national press treatment of Clinton campaign leaves much to be desired. The Clinton complaint that Barack Obama is getting off the hook on the when it comes to health care is legitimate. And the portrayal of Clinton as "angry" has dipped below responsible levels routinely; no one wrote that John Edwards "snapped" at Clinton and Obama when he went on a populist tirade. Local press is better on this score, as they want to write more a bit more about issues and a bit less about the middle school grudge match .
I can't figure out how much of this is due to long-term Clinton-loathing in particular, and how much is due to the cultural backsliding in the treatment of women, but either way, the it's something that needs to be considered before Kay Bailey Hutchison or Stephanie Herseth Sandlen run for President.
Well, even if we don't nominate Hillary, we can still annoy the media by not giving McCain a 50-state, 99% popular vote victory this fall.
Posted by: Stephen | February 26, 2008 at 11:11 AM
Nah, we can really annoy them by not watching them or paying attention to them in the slightest (are you listening, Mr. Matthews?)
I find the best televised news coverage about America is on BBC-America. Everything else is bad comedy. And then there's FOX News, whose bring-on-the-shrieking-heads format and neverending vomitstream of gossip, innuendo, and outright fabrication presented as "content" is truly sui generis, certainly it doesn't even qualify as bad comedy.
Posted by: litbrit | February 26, 2008 at 11:31 AM
On that subject, this<,/a> is awful.
Posted by: SDM | February 26, 2008 at 12:38 PM
Well the whole exercise of process spin is just silly. I mean, there's a circular problem where the press is interested in process and horserace, so if you don't do this spin, they'll just kick you when you're down, but when you're down, it's hard to spin. The right answer is ... the press should cover the horserace less!
Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | February 26, 2008 at 01:19 PM
I liked the Milbank article. In general, I think it better for journalists to report spin as spin, not as some version of reality. Especially when it is clearly detached from reality. I suspect that everyone here would have liked that article if it were about BS coming from the Bush White House.
Posted by: ikl | February 26, 2008 at 04:39 PM
no one wrote that John Edwards "snapped" at Clinton and Obama when he went on a populist tirade.
No, they'd just write that he was going off on an 'angry' populist tirade, if they deigned to pay attention to him in the least. (Lord knows they tried to shut him out of the news for most of 2007.)
Posted by: low-tech cyclist | February 26, 2008 at 05:28 PM
Wow -- I have such mixed feelings about the Milbank article -- in a kind of plague on both your houses way. Two insufferably smug forces, each armed with tneir own dubious, yet strong sense of conventional wisdom battling each other while basically missing the point.
They're all assholes.
Posted by: Sir Charles | February 26, 2008 at 08:08 PM