America's political
reporters don't like John Edwards, and have tried to destroy him.
But don't take my word
for it.
Marc Ambinder was one
of the founders of ABC's The Note and is a contributing editor to the
National
Journal's Hotline
newsletter. The Note and the Hotline consist
largely of links to and excerpts of political news and commentary by other
reporters with ample doses of snark and Rove-worship thrown in. Whatever they
may lack in insight and judgment, The Note and the Hotline are at the center of
the D.C. political media establishment.
Ambinder, in other
words, is a political reporter whose job has largely been to understand the
political media.
This week, Marc
Ambinder explained why the media has covered John
Edwards' grooming
regimen so much and Mitt Romney's so little:
There is a
difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the
national political press corps doesn't like John Edwards.
Fairly or unfairly, there's also a
difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was
trying to bury Edwards. It's not so much interested in burying Romney right now
-- many reporters think he's the Republican frontrunner.
Now, if reporters
dislike a candidate, that's their business. But when they wage a relentless and
petty campaign to "bury" that candidate, that's our business. All of
us.
And we've been through
this before.
The 2000 election was
close enough that any number of things can fairly be described as having made
the difference. But what Bob Somerby describes as the media's "War Against Gore"
was undoubtedly one of the biggest factors in Bush's "victory." The contempt
many political reporters felt for Gore is clear, as is the inaccurate, unfair,
and grossly distorted coverage of Gore that decided the campaign. And, again, you needn't
take my word for it: Bob
Somerby, Eric Alterman, Eric Boehlert, and others
have chronicled the acknowledgements by working journalists of their
colleagues' hate for
Gore. Jake Tapper described reporters "hissing" -- actually
hissing -- Gore.
Time's Eric Pooley described an
incident in which a roomful of reporters "erupted in a collective jeer" of Gore
"like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless
nerd."
And Joe Scarborough
-- conservative television host Joe
Scarborough; former Republican
Congressman Joe Scarborough -- has said
that during the 2000 election, the media "were fairly brutal to Al Gore. ... [I]f
they had done that to a Republican candidate, I'd be going on your show saying,
you know, that they were being biased."
Somerby has long argued
that one of the reasons the media's hatred for Gore was able to define the 2000
campaign so completely is that too few people talked about it
-- and
demanded that it stop -- at the
time. Indeed, as he writes today, too many of those who should be combating
these nonsensical but damaging storylines repeat
them instead:
But then, inside
Washington,
establishment liberals and Democrats often seem congenitally unable to
understand the shape of the past fifteen years. Haircuts -- and earth
tones -- have
destroyed the known world! But so what? Dems and libs keep reciting these trivia! We keep inviting the public to draw conclusions
from these idiot tales.
One recent example
occurred during Wednesday's Lou Dobbs
Tonight, when Air America Radio host Laura Flanders
said that Barack Obama has "kind of
become the female on this race. ... He's seen as the weaker -- cute, attractive. ...
Hillary is the one with the balls." In just a few moments, Flanders managed to
suggest that a male progressive is feminine and that a female is masculine
-- one of the
conservatives' favorite tactics for marginalizing progressives -- and to
equate being "female" with being "weak." With progressives like Laura Flanders,
who needs Ann Coulter?
For anyone who would
rather fight these absurd media storylines than repeat them, coverage of
Edwards' haircut presents a valuable opportunity to do
so.
