Washington Post Takes Cues From Drudge, Runs Awful Photo Of Hillary's Wrinkles
December 26, 2007 -- 10:39 AM EST // //
Looks like Matt Drudge has gotten himself a new gig -- he's just been signed up as an assignment editor for The Washington Post.
So it seems, anyway. Let me explain: Early last week I noted here that Drudge and Rush Limbaugh were having a grand old time making fun of Hillary's wrinkles after Drudge posted an exceptionally unflattering pic of Hillary looking, shall we say, not at her best. Drudge left the photo up for days.
Now today's Washington Post has gone and run the photo. The paper's justification for doing this was to accompany it with an article that purports to discuss the journalistically "difficult issues" raised by the question of whether to run such an image, which WaPo calls a "hangdog shot." First, the writer of the piece, Philip Kennicott, acknowledges that the pic is just plain awful:
The popular Drudge Report Web site recently ran a particularly notorious picture of Hillary Clinton, showing her face riven with deep furrows and wrinkles. She looked so awful that even some conservative commentators noted the unfairness of using such a manifestly unflattering image.But then, even though his own paper ran the very same pic, Kennicott tried to argue that traditional news orgs like WaPo approach the question of whether to run it so much more responsibly than the new media rabble do:
In the partisan media (much of the blogosphere, the tabloids and several cable channels), these images are used freely and gleefully. In media that strive for objectivity, the hangdog shot raises difficult issues. In an earlier age of newspapering, sorting through the archives for an image that confirmed your headline was acceptable practice. Today, serious newspapers try to use images from the most recent campaign events rather than something a few months old, even if it fits the story line better.So, for "serious" news orgs, pics like these raise "difficult issues" that the "partisan" new media won't entertain, eh? Not difficult enough to prevent the paper from making the despicable decision to run the pic anyway, even though the photo wasn't at all from "the most recent campaign events"; rather, the pic is more than 10 days old.
So why did WaPo run the pic at all? Easy -- it decided to take its editorial cues from Drudge and let him set their editorial agenda. And in exchange for legitimizing Drudge's "news judgment" in this fashion, the paper's editors today got the Drudge link they obviously craved, which means they'll fall asleep tonight with smiles on their faces. It's yet another reminder that Mark Halperin was only half-right when he said, "Matt Drudge rules our world." Rather, for too many people at the big news orgs, the operative slogan is actually:
Matt Drudge rules our world -- because we'll happily prostrate ourselves at his feet and kiss his toes in exchange for a link!
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