How Trivial Can the Media Make the Presidential Race? - The Diigo Meta page

• 18 Jan 08
  

  Mark Haslam

  democrat huckabee media obama presidential republican

  • Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign   journalism is essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly   noble one at that. On the trail, we reporters aren't watching   politics in action: The real stuff happens behind closed doors,   where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are glad-handing   equally faceless members of the political donor class,   collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off   in very specific favors over the course of the next four years.   That's the real high-stakes poker game in this business, and we   don't get to sit at that table
  • How did one of the most genuinely interesting primary contests   in American history devolve into a Grade-D smack-down that even   Vince McMahon would be ashamed to promote? The real story of the   campaign has been its unprecedented unpredictability -- and   therein lies the problem. On both tickets, the abject failure of   media-anointed front-runners to hold their ground was due at   least in part to voters having grown weary of being told by the   press who was "electable" and who wasn't. Both the Huckabee and   Ron Paul candidacies represent angry grass-roots challenges to   the entrenched Republican party apparatus, while the Edwards   candidacy is a frank and open attack on his own party's too-cozy   relationship with corporate America. These developments signaled   a meaningful political phenomenon -- widespread voter disgust,   not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national   political press that smugly enforced the party insiders'   stranglehold on the process with its incessant bullying of   dissident candidates.

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