Poll: Nearly Half Of Dems Say Media Is Harder On Hillary
(March 1, 2008 -- 11:10 AM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

Well, it looks like we've found yet another topic on which many average voters are way ahead of the pundits: The question of whether the media is harder on Hillary than on other candidates.

As regular readers know, this blog is sympathetic to the claim that in the broadest possible sense, much media coverage and punditry is unfair to Hillary on a very fundamental level and is tougher on her than on her rivals. This claim was advanced recently by the Hillary campaign itself -- a fact that doesn't necessarily render the claim false, incidentally -- prompting an instant outpouring of scorn from top-shelf commentators.

Maureen Dowd, for instance, had a grand old time mocking the claim, snarking: "It is only because of the utter open-mindedness of the press that Hillary can lose 11 contests in a row and still be treated as a contender."

Well, it looks like much of the public is able to see the obvious, even if Dowd and her cohorts won't. Check out what Democratic primary voters think of this matter, according to this week's New York Times poll:

Compared to the way the news media have treated other candidates, have the news media been harder on Hillary Clinton, easier on Hillary Clinton, or have they treated her the same as other candidates?

Harder 48%

Easier 8%

Same 43%

Meanwhile, only 13% say the press is tougher on Obama. Now, a couple quick caveats. Yes, the Hillary camp's media bashing is a strategy. And no, Hillary isn't merely a passive victim of bad coverage -- her campaign is partly to blame for her media travails, too. Also, it would be more illuminating if a pollster asked if people see the media as unfair to Hillary, rather than just asking if they think the press is harder on her, as this poll does.

Nonetheless, these numbers are noteworthy. The fact that the press is tougher on her should be plainly obvious to anyone who's paying even the most cursory level of attention to what's happening, and it's good to see that sizable chunk of the voters can see this, even if many pundits continue to pretend that it isn't the case.

Update: Some readers point out that a larger number -- 51% -- think the coverage has been the same or easier on her. I don't think this diminishes the larger point here. Nearly four times as many respondents (48%) think the press has been harder on Hillary than think it has been harder on Obama (13%).

What's more, it's still eye-opening that nearly half of Dems say the media's been harder on Hillary -- it's a far larger proportion than among the pundits, who rarely if ever acknowledge this to be the case. That's the main point here.

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Author Of Infamous "Blog Rage" Piece Says Bloggers Are Real Journalists
(February 29, 2008 -- 3:24 PM EDT // link // )

Via Romenesko, the executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, Jim Brady, has offered up some extremely sensible thoughts about the relationship between bloggers and the traditional media:

“I think the argument about bloggers vs. journalists has been over for years,” said Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com. “We’ve all co-existed just fine for a while now, and the truth is, the distinction is less relevant every day. There are thousands of journalists who now blog, and there are lots of bloggers who are trained journalists.”

“I don’t think readers care whether what they’re reading is in a blog or not. What they care about is whether they trust the source of that information, whether it’s a mainstream site or a pure blog.”

It's true that bloggers and journalists are starting to learn to co-exist quite nicely, and indeed, the distinction is losing relevance every day, as Brady says. But I'm not flagging this merely because Brady's right. Rather, I'm noting it because Brady's thoughts are particularly interesting in the context of a now-forgotten piece of ancient history that took place all the way back in 2006.

Specifically, I'm talking about the fact that Brady was for a time one of the Great Villains of the blogosphere. I don't remember the particulars of it now, but there was some fracas involving WaPo Ombud Deborah Howell that resulted in Brady being hit by one of the fiercest blogswarms of this millennium.

In response, Brady wrote an infamous piece, entitled "BLOG RAGE" (caps in original) in which he shared his feelings about having been "mugged by the blogosphere." Though there was a bit of positive stuff about the blogosphere in the piece, it was widely panned as a kind of reactionary anti-blog manifesto.

Anyway, in light of that history, Brady's welcome remarks about the eroding distinctions between journalists and bloggers seemed significant, or at least worthy of a quick Friday afternoon mention.

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Silly Suck-Up-To-Drudge Moment Of The Day
(February 29, 2008 -- 10:56 AM EDT // link // )

As noted below, this blog bestows the much-coveted Silly Suck-Up-To-Drudge Moment Of The Day Award when circumstances warrant -- when, for instance, journalists deliberately tailor their copy to get linked by Drudge or when they give him gratuitous plugs or overstate his influence in some grotesque way.

And today's award goes to...

The Telegraph's Toby Harnden!!!

He gets the honor for writing the following:

He remains an elusive, mysterious figure but the internet pioneer is arguably the single most powerful journalist -- though his detractors even deny that is his occupation -- in the world.

Yep -- Drudge is the most powerful journalist "in the world." More powerful than New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, Times edit page editor Andy Rosenthal, Washington Post chief Len Downie, WaPo edit page editor Fred Hiatt, CNN president Jonathan Klein, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, the editors of Time and Newsweek, the top executives and producers at all the major networks, etc., etc...

And, as always, those hailing Drudge's "power" are the very same people who are giving him that power by pretending that his reporting is in any way valid. Harnshaw, for instance, writes the following about Drudge and his silly "scoop" that Hillary staffers had "circulated" a picture of Obama in Somali garb...

By the end, he had become Hillary Clinton's weapon of choice against Mr Obama.

Right, but Hillary's campaign denied that this happened, and there's no evidence whatsoever that this happened beyond confirmed-fact-inventor Drudge's word for it, Mr. Harnshaw. You grant him this power by pretending that what he reported is confirmed truth.

Needless to say, Mr. Harnshaw's story got its Drudge link.

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Poll: Huge Majority Thinks Internet Is Having "Positive Impact" On Journalism
(February 28, 2008 -- 4:40 PM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

It's a common blogospheric refrain that the American public is way ahead of the commentators on key political questions. Well, it turns out that the public might also be way ahead when it comes to judging the value, impact and significance of the Internet and blogosphere, too.

Via Romenesko, John Zogby has a very interesting new poll out that probes public attitudes towards the Internet and its relationship to the traditional news media. Check out these numbers:

* Web sites are seen as a "more important source of news and information than traditional media outlets." Eighty-six percent say Web sites are an "important" news source, compared to 77% who picked television and 70% who picked newspapers. Obviously, traditional news outlets also have online presences, so the meaning of this breakdown isn't terribly clear cut, but it's noteworthy.

And get this -- some 38% said blogs are an "important" source of news. That's less than the others, and the study also finds that almost no respondents pick blogs as their "primary" news source. But the fact that nearly 40% say blogs, as opposed to Web sites, are an "important" news source seems surprisingly high.

* A whopping 77% see "citizen journalism" as important for the future of journalism, and a solid majority of 59% see blogs as vital to its future, too. While those numbers are lower than the 87% who see "professional journalism" as key, those are still striking.

* And finally, three in four, or 75%, think the Internet has "had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism."

We all know that the Internet and blogosphere have their share of failings. But these numbers suggest public attitudes that really are at odds with the barbarians-are-at-the-gates critique of the Internet and blogs you heard for so long from certain journalistic wise men, though that critique is getting tougher to sustain and you're hearing less and less of it lately.

Somewhere, David Broder is grumbling.

Update: It's worth noting that this is an online poll, but the numbers are still significant. They suggest a real and growing base of support for the idea that the Internet and blogs are having a salutary effect on journalism and are as credible or more so than traditional media. And the numbers on blogs and citizen journalism are particularly striking.

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Fox News Falsely Claims That Weatherman Bill Ayers Was Obama's "Mentor"
(February 28, 2008 -- 11:20 AM EDT // link // )

One thing to keep a lookout for when watching the emerging wingnut-slime-machine assault on Barack Obama is efforts to build a superstructure of lies on top of a foundation of a few inconsequential facts.

This sort of stuff has the potential to be effective, because once people accept the germ of truth within the assault, they're at risk of believing the grotesque falsehoods that sprouted from it. The wingers are very good at doing this, as we've seen again and again.

Here, for instance, is a "report" on Fox News, by radio host John Batchelor, on Obama's alleged ties to Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground who has been unrepentant about the bombs set by the group. The germ of the story -- that Obama has some sort of relationship with him -- is true. But look at how creatively Batchelor embellishes the whole tale...

You see, in Fox's telling, now Ayers is Obama's "mentor" and he and fellow Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn were "principals" on his first campaign for state senate. Also note how Batchelor slyly slips in the reference to September 11th, an obvious effort to connect the bombing by Obama's "mentor" to the terrorism that brought down the towers.

Now, far be it from me to question Batchelor's reporting abilities. But none of this additional info is sourced in any way. And it hasn't been reported anywhere, either. This has been looked into pretty exhaustively, and what's been reported thus far is that Obama met with Ayers and Dohrn in 1995; Obama served with Ayers on the board of an anti-poverty group; Ayers donated $200 to Obama's 2001 state senate campaign; and the two men are " friendly."

If Ayers were really Obama's "mentor" someone would have attested to this by now. And if Ayers and Dohrn had been "principals" on his campaign you'd think there would be a record of it somewhere. This is fiction, pure and simple. But it's the kind of fiction that has the potential to get folks saying, hey, didja hear Obama's tight with some America-hating dude who blew up a bunch of stuff? The guy was Obama's mentor, or something...

At any rate, get ready for eight months of this sort of garbage. It's going to get a lot uglier than this.

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Could Hillary Camp's Attacks On Press Bear Some Fruit?
(February 27, 2008 -- 5:05 PM EDT // link // )

Yesterday I argued that Hillary's new strategy -- attacking the press as rooting for her defeat -- ran the risk of making things worse for her by making the campaign look frustrated and in search of a scapegoat, something that spooks supporters and donors.

But now I think it's fair to ask whether the strategy is also bearing at least a bit of fruit.

The full force of Camp Hillary's assault on the media really became public yesterday morning. Since then, CNN ran a lengthy segment on the Hillary campaign's gripe that Obama is getting largely "rock star" treatment from the press.

Just a few minutes ago, CNN ran another lengthy segment, this one about Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired pastor at Obama's church who lavishly praised Louis Farrakhan. The piece had a pretty tough chyron:

What Obama's Pastor Said

Jewish-American Concerns

During the segment, Wolf Blitzer noted that Obama "faces questions about his level of support for Israel from some American Jews." Tough scrutiny -- if not on this precise topic -- is exactly what the Hillary campaign has been asking for from the major news orgs, of course.

To be clear, the points I raised yesterday about this approach still stand. And obviously, a couple CNN segments is hardly enough to judge whether Camp Hillary's bash-the-press strategy will work in any meaningful sense. Even if it did work to some degree, it seems unlikely that it would alter the outcome of the contest.

Still, you have to wonder whether CNN would have aired these segments at these lengths, or with this sort of tone, if Hillary advisers hadn't spent so much time of late stamping their feet over the media's alleged softness on Obama. Someone at CNN seems to be listening, and responding accordingly.

Update: It's worth recalling that CNN has proven pliant in the face of such criticism before. When the Obama camp complained to CNN about its use of Hillary supporters James Carville and Paul Begala as on-air analysts, the network banned them except in outright surrogate situations.

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Maureen Dowd: Only Reason Hillary Is Still In Race Is Because Of Media's Benevolence
(February 27, 2008 -- 10:35 AM EDT // link // )

So Maureen Dowd's column this morning bashed Hillary yet again, in terms strikingly similar to what we've heard already in many of her recent columns.

Yawn. So, so, so boring. I repeat: Just try to imagine what The New York Times could accomplish if they took Dowd's premiere-columnist salary and invested it elsewhere.

But put that aside for a sec. I wanted to flag a line in the column that perfectly encapsulates top-shelf pundit elitism at its finest. Referring to Hillary's new strategy of bashing the press coverage, Dowd writes:

Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do. It is only because of the utter open-mindedness of the press that Hillary can lose 11 contests in a row and still be treated as a contender.

Right, so according to Dowd, the only reason we're still conducting this presidential race is because she and her fellow media cohorts are benevolently holding off on crowning Obama the winner. That's just so lovely and generous of them, isn't it?

Actually, the real reason Hillary is being still treated as a contender is because millions upon millions of voters in two very big states haven't gone to the polls yet. I know, it's highly unlikely that she'll mount a comeback, to put it charitably. But still -- is it okay if we wait for those poor voters to have their say before we kick off the celebrations of her loss?

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Hillary Spokesperson Blasts Reporters For Using Drudge As Their "Assignment Editor"
(February 26, 2008 -- 5:18 PM EDT // link // )

In this morning's Washington Post, Dana Milbank has a sketch that mocks Hillary spokesperson Phil Singer for lambasting reporters at a breakfast yesterday.

Singer was ticked because the press was following Matt Drudge's story about Hillary's staffers allegedly spreading a pic of Obama in a turban:

Before the breakfast crowd had a chance to digest that, they were served another, stranger course by Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer. Asked about an accusation on the Drudge Report that Clinton staffers had circulated a photo of Barack Obama wearing Somali tribal dress, Singer let 'er rip.

"I find it interesting that in a room of such esteemed journalists that Mr. Drudge has become your respected assignment editor," he lectured. "I find it to be a reflection of one of the problems that's gone on with the overall coverage of this campaign."...

The brief moment explained everything about the bitter relations between Clinton's campaign and the media: Singer taunting the likes of Broder, who began covering presidential politics two decades before Singer was born...

Milbank thinks the observation that reporters used Drudge as an "assignment editor" yesterday is strange and amounts to a taunt. But isn't it basically true? Mark Halperin openly says Drudge "rules our world," doesn't he?

Let's review. Yesterday Drudge ran an item saying that unnamed Hillary "staffers" had "circulated" the photo. Drudge didn't say who the staffers were or what level they occupy in the campaign. Drudge didn't say whom the photo was circulated among. It was just "circulated." This has no meaning. If one of Hillary's lowliest staffers emailed the pic to another lowly staffer, Drudge's description would still apply.

Based on the strength of confirmed-fact-inventor Drudge's word and nothing else, the Obama camp attacked Hillary for dirty politics. But even before Obama released their statement, reporters were asking about the Drudge story -- even though it didn't really say anything with any meaning.

By the end of the day, all the major news orgs were carrying this story (as was TPM Election Central). Even though Camp Hillary belatedly denied it. Even though no evidence ever emerged beyond Drudge's word that it had happened. And even though Drudge hadn't even alleged anything clear-cut at all to begin with.

Is the fault partly the Hillary campaign's? Absolutely. They waited way too long to deny the story. You could argue that the Camp Hillary denial wasn't absolute -- but again, what exactly were they supposed to be denying? And let's face it -- no matter how forceful or early the denial had been, all the news orgs would have run with it, anyway. Even Milbank's WaPo colleague, Chris Cillizza, yesterday opined that the Obama camp attacked Hillary precisely because they could count on the networks to run the story based solely on Drudge's word.

Does this performance count as using Drudge as your assignment editor?

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John Solomon's Washington Times Presents The Next Obama Smear: Military "Fears" Him
(February 26, 2008 -- 12:57 PM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

Here's some more proof, as if you needed it, that our old pal John Solomon isn't exactly having a salutary impact on the journalism at The Washington Times, as his former colleagues assured us he would.

Today's edition of WashTimes rolls out a fresh and newly-minted Obama smear, one we haven't seen before:

Military Fears "Unknown Quantity"

Members of Washington's military and defense establishment are expressing trepidation about Sen. Barack Obama, as the Illinois senator comes closer to winning the Democratic presidential nomination and leads in national polls to become commander in chief.

Guess how many "members of Washington's military and defense establishment" are quoted saying that they fear this "unknown quantity":

Exactly one. And that one person is a retired Air Force Lieutenant General who doubles as a Fox News analyst.

The piece does quote an Obama ally conceding that senior officers view him "skeptically," and for all I know maybe some members of the military establishment somewhere do view Obama with trepidation. But this piece falls far short of demonstrating anything like the "fear" that it claims military members are experiencing.

What's more, this suggestion in the hed that he's widely feared as an "unknown quantity" comes from a single anonymous source. And it gets even worse than this. The piece quotes a Pentagon official saying anonymously that an Obama win in November "will give the Arab street the final victory, the best optics, and the ultimate in bragging rights. They win. We lose."

Doesn't get much lower than that.

Is it really possible that such gutter journalism tactics would be signed off on by such a great journalist, as Beltway types keep calling Solomon? Shocking, I tell you.

Update: The irrepressible Instaputz has a truly hilarious Solomon memo. And Media Matters nails the above story for another bit of clownish misleading.

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Bill Kristol Previews GOP Attack On Obama: He Thinks He's Better Than You
(February 25, 2008 -- 11:30 AM EDT // link // )

Let it be noted that Bill Kristol's column is not entirely useless. Today's effort, for instance, neatly offers us a preview of what Barack Obama will face from the GOP attack machine and its media enablers this fall, should he become the Dem nominee.

Kristol manages the neat trick of wrapping up not one, but two highly dubious anti-Obama smears into his first few grafs -- the bogus flag-pin patriotism story and Michelle Obama's claim that she's really proud of her country for the first time.

That's to be expected, of course. But what interests me is the overarching theme he uses to tie them together: They both show, he suggests, that haughty and elitist Obama thinks he's better than you and the average Joe. We saw these exact same attacks lobbed relentlessly at Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, of course.

Kristol reaches this "conclusion" by pointing to Obama's claim that he stopped wearing the flag pin because it "became a substitute" for "true patriotism." This, Kristol said, was tantamount to Obama saying that "he was too good" to wear the pin...

Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?

It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself.

Consider yourself warned. Presuming Obama wins the nomination, the Dem will be cast among other things as haughty, patronizing, effete, and disdainful of traditional American values, unlike his salt-of-the-earth GOP opponent, who doesn't presume to be better than you. Sound familiar?

Speaking broadly, in 2000 and 2004 the traditional news orgs and pundits were more than happy to play along with this bogus narrative. Will it happen again? For all sorts of reasons the media dynamic may prove different this time around. Obama is far more rhetorically dexterous than either Gore or Kerry. There's a more robust liberal web presence hitting back at this sort of media nonsense than there was four years ago. And there are plenty of signs that many media figures are far more enamored of Obama than they were of either of his predecessors.

Nonetheless, this is a hint of what's coming, and our elite journalistic institutions and top-shelf media figures have proven more than happy to play along with it before. So Obama needs to be ready for it.

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Times Public Editor: Paper Shouldn't Have Published Suggestion Of McCain Affair
(February 24, 2008 -- 11:55 AM EDT // link // )

In his column today, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt gets it right on the paper's big McCain article, arguing that the paper shouldn't have suggested the possibility that he'd had an affair with that female lobbyist without evidence as to whether it actually happened:

The article was notable for what it did not say: It did not say what convinced the advisers that there was a romance. It did not make clear what McCain was admitting when he acknowledged behaving inappropriately — an affair or just an association with a lobbyist that could look bad. And it did not say whether Weaver, the only on-the-record source, believed there was a romance. The Times did not offer independent proof,..

A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.

Hoyt also asked the same question posed below on this blog: Why not run the story without the sexual dimension?

I asked Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, if The Times could have done the story and left out the allegation about an affair. “That would not have reflected the essential truth of why the aides were alarmed,” she said.

But what the aides believed might not have been the real truth. And if you cannot provide readers with some independent evidence, I think it is wrong to report the suppositions or concerns of anonymous aides about whether the boss is getting into the wrong bed.

This was always the problem here. The issue was never whether the individual facts, as rendered in the article, were accurate or not. Rather, it was that it's simply impossible to report that aides believed that there might have been an affair without basically alleging that it happened, particularly in the context of a white hot presidential race.

If the paper is going to report that people worried that a politician might have had an improper romantic relationship, readers -- and the paper's subject -- deserve also to be given evidence, one way or the other, as to whether the affair actually happened or not. If such evidence is unattainable, or can't be presented to readers for whatever reason, then going there at all is plainly very hard to defend.

But Abramson and Times executive editor Bill Keller, who are sticking by the story, seem to disagree with this simple point. Mystifying indeed.

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