Times' Adam Nagourney Cops To Helping Create "Breck Girl" Slur
April 23, 2007 -- 3:16 PM EST // // Post a Comment
The other day, I noted that The New York Times had injected the original "Breck girl" insult of John Edwards into the discourse by quoting anonymous Bushites using the slur against him back in 2003.
Today, in light of the "controversy" surrounding Edwards' $400 haircut, The Times's Adam Nagourney offers up a mea culpa of sorts for his role in helping give widespread currency to the schoolyard taunt. He writes:
Our story may have had the result of not only previewing what the Bush campaign intended to do, but, by introducing such memorably biting characterizations into the political dialogue, helping it. Was that a mistake on our part? Perhaps......faced with the same situation again, I would press the Bush officials to be named in offering their characterizations; no justification for anonymity here. And based on my experience in trying to insist more often that sources speak on the record in this campaign season, I think I might have succeeded.
Nagourney's conclusion about the whole haircut affair, however, is curious. He notes that even the Edwards campaign was upset with its handling of it, adding that the media attention "was a reminder that, fair or not, this remains a persistent vulnerability for Mr. Edwards." He adds: "appearances matter in politics, and four years after the Breck Girl line first appeared in print, Mr. Edwards continues to have trouble leaving it behind." Yes, but why does this difficulty persist?
I have no problem partly blaming Edwards' faulty political judgment here, a case that was deftly made the other day by Ezra Klein. But to paraphrase Joe Conason, it's possible to keep two ideas in our heads at the same time:
(1) Edwards screwed up.
(2) The decision by many in the media to devote the amount of attention to Edwards' fair locks that they did was idiotic and indefensible.
The fact that Nagourney is revisiting his decision to float the "Breck girl" schoolyard taunt is a good thing. But the real media failure here was one of degree. As gets repeated here all too often, the deafening roar of media coverage of Edwards' haircut was the result of editorial decisions. Such coverage is not involuntary or inevitable. It is not a fact of nature. It is the result of decisions made by human beings -- the Associated Press' editorial decision to run a whole stand-alone piece about it with a lead calling Edwards "pretty"; Maureen Dowd's editorial decision to write a whole column about it; and a whole bunch of other similar decisions.
Is the fact that Edwards' GOP rivals pushed the story an excuse for all the coverage? Candidates attack each other all the time; reporters and editors don't have to cover it, and often don't. Apologies for stating the obvious, but reporters and editors choose to cover what they do -- as well as choosing the tone, placement and intensity of the coverage -- based on their own judgment of the subject matter's news value. Wouldn't a short mention of the haircut in an AP story have sufficed? Yeah, the Edwards camp screwed up. But we're talking about the man's hair, people!
Update: Don't miss the takes by Matthew Yglesias and Scott Lemieux on why the media's purely to blame here. Also Garance Franke-Ruta arguing the Edwards-is-a-bonehead case.
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