There Can Be More Than One Reason That Things Happen In Politics
January 8, 2008 -- 3:28 PM EST // //
Bill Clinton unloaded on the media's treatment of his wife again yesterday, sparking a big new debate around the question of whether the press' treatment of Hillary has been overly hostile.
The Huffington Post's Roy Sekoff says that the media isn't to blame for Hillary's travails, concluding that the fault, dear Hillary, lies not in the performance of media stars, but in ourselves:
I think trying to blame the media is like saying that the failure of New Coke was because the guy who delivered it. The bottom line is the product's not selling. It's not the media. They're just rejecting the message.This is puzzling, and it reflects one of the weirder failings that you often hear in discussions about political coverage: This idea that there can only be one reason that things happen in politics. Can't Hillary's campaign be faltering both because of the relentless media piling on and because of her campaign's failings? There's no reason for these to be mutually exclusive.
Indeed, the key point to take away here is that these phenomena are inextricably linked -- and in a fashion that actually messes up our discourse in a big way. Often when a candidate commits a misstep the press responds by exaggerating both the significance of it and it's potential to harm the campaign. That in turn makes voters accord it more weight than it deserves. The end result is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the misstep does risk being more damaging than it should have been in a sane universe, precisely because of the coverage and commentary it initially received.
In Hillary's tears yesterday you have the perfect example of this. For God's sake, the woman teared up a bit. Big friggin' deal. She's human, after all. But then the tears led all the major evening newscasts, and analysts like The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza started murmuring, absent any evidence, that the tears would without question weigh heavily on the minds of New Hampshire voters today.
Result: This could end up damaging her campaign, but not merely because the networks were right to judge the tears to be this newsworthy or because pundits were right in saying it could be damaging. Rather, they themselves participated in the process that suddenly elevated a fleeting emotional moment into something that could conceivably have a far greater impact than it should.
Yes, candidates are to blame for their own missteps. But I don't see how anyone could live through Campaign 2008 and not conclude that the process by which information about the candidates is transmitted to voters is profoundly screwed up.
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