NY Times: Hillary's Fundraising Numbers More Important Than Fate Of The Planet
October 3, 2007 -- 3:38 PM EST // //
Okay, not quite. But sort of. Lemme explain.
Today's New York Times went huge with the news that Hillary bested Barack in fundraising yesterday, splashing its story on the front page with three columns above the fold. Towards the very end of the story, Times reporter Patrick Healy reveals that the Hillary people deliberately leaked their fundraising info yesterday to distract attention from Barack's big anti-nukes speech yesterday:
Then, as Mr. Obama was announcing his fund-raising results on Monday, the Clinton campaign kept quiet because it did not want to share the news cycle with him, Clinton advisers say. As a final move, yesterday, the advisers said they deliberately tried to upstage Mr. Obama during his Iraq speech.That's a nice piece of reporting, but really, if this is so, then why is The New York Times helping Hillary "upstage" Obama by splashing this all over its front page? The paper buried its piece on Obama's speech deep in the paper. Is Hillary's fundraising win really far more newsworthy than Obama's major speech on an issue that quite literally has profound implications for the fate of the planet? Maybe Times editors thought that the speech was old news, because the paper had broken the story about the speech a day in advance, but even that piece was buried, too.
Was Hillary's fundraising score huge front page news? When Obama announced raising an astounding $32 million back in July, the paper put the story on page 13. The Times piece on Hillary's fundraising numbers justifies its prominent placement by claiming that it meant that "a major dynamic" in the race had "shifted." But has this really happened in any meaningful sense? Deeper in the piece it says that Obama has still outraised Hillary in cash for the primary overall, and even characterizes Hillary's lead in primary funds this quarter, which is only $3 million, as "modest."
It's a big stretch to claim that this shows that a "major dynamic" has shifted. Indeed, it's virtually certain that the $3 million difference in their primary fundraising this quarter will have no appreciable impact whatsoever on the outcome of the primary. After all, we don't even know how much primary cash the campaigns have on hand -- a far more important indicator. And numbers like these -- which mean little or nothing to, you know, the voters -- will be long forgotten when actual voting begins.
Don't get me wrong. Hillary's $27 million is obviously a much bigger haul than Obama's $20 million, and Obama's people are unhappy about it because it will cause a shift of sorts -- in the direction of insider chatter. But the bottom line is that both sides will have more than enough cash to jam TV ads down the throats of voters until they puke.
The larger point here is that importance of fundraising numbers is not preordained. Rather, they're given inflated importance by editorial decisions like the one the Times made today. You can bet that loud cackles of happy laughter broke out at Hillary headquarters when they saw the paper's front page this morning.
Update: As Ana Marie Cox puts it: "I don't know why we even bother with, you know, elections and stuff."
Update II: And Ana makes the case at length, with an interesting twist, in a new podcast she just posted over at Time.com's Swampland blog. Take a look.
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