Washington Post: Forget Edwards -- The Dem Primary Is Nothing More Than A "Clinton-Obama Rivalry"
November 12, 2007 -- 1:06 PM EST // //
As all you regulars know, one of this blog's running gripes is the refusal of your political media to acknowledge their own role in creating the narratives that help determine the outcome of campaigns.
Case in point -- this nugget from today's Washington Post report on the sparring between the candidates at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner this weekend:
Edwards was the first of six presidential candidates to speak, and he tried to elbow his way into the Clinton-Obama rivalry with a populist call for Democrats to stand up against corporate interests and cleanse Washington of the corrupting influence of money and power.According to WaPo, Edwards' speech was all about trying to "elbow his way" into the Hillary-Obama "rivalry." This makes it sound as if Campaign 2008 were less a political race than some kind of exclusive party that Hillary and Obama are throwing that Edwards is rudely trying to crash. But who decided that this race is little more than a Hillary-Obama rivalry in the first place? Why, WaPo did, of course!
After all, the same WaPo reporters who chose to describe Edwards' speech as an effort to "elbow" his way into the Hillary-Obama rivalry also chose to devote the first eight paragraphs of their piece only to what Hillary and Obama said. They chose to wait until the ninth graf to tell us what Edwards said. This despite the fact that the reporters also acknowledge that polls show that in Iowa the race remains "a competitive three-way contest."
So if by WaPo's own admission this is a competitive contest between all three candidates, why go to such extreme editorial lengths to frame it as a two-person race that Edwards is trying to "elbow" his way into?
This might not have been worth bothering with if it didn't perfectly capture a lot about what's been wrong with so much of the reporting on Campaign 2008. What's bizarre is how blatant this has become -- in cases like this no one even bothers to conceal how unabashedly manufactured the chosen narrative of the moment is.
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