Quote of the Day

"So far, media behavior in the 2008 campaign has been even worse than in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. We’re mired in a disastrous war, there’s a crisis in the housing market, the health care system is collapsing — yet the coverage is all about the horserace, rather than the issues."
--Paul Krugman, noting how doomed we are, on his NY Times blog.

I had this same feeling after seeing clips from the recent CNN Democratic debate. The CNN moderators were more interested in discussing the fighting between Clinton, Obama, and Edwards than they were were about serious policy discussions (Joe Biden expressed shock when he was first called on).

(This is a chicken-and-the-egg thing, of course. Does cable news give viewers fluff because that's what people want? Or do people want fluff because the networks made them addicted to it/expect it? Any votes on this?)

When the moderators did discuss issues, they focused on the campaign aspect of it. The crowd actually started booing Wolf Blitzer, hoping to remind him that he's a journalist, not someone asking Angelina Jolie on the red carpet where she got her dress.

In the 2000 campaign, when the media discussed Al Gore, it was all about style (he sighed at a debate, his suits weren't the right color). Maybe they should've discussed his Social Security lockbox idea more... in hindsight, more important than whether he kissed his wife enough. In 2004, it was all about John Kerry the flip-flopper and his botox. I doubt anyone today can tell you what his health-care proposal was; lord knows I never saw a report on it.

The media clearly hasn't learned its lesson from this; their love of fluff and stale narratives runs too deep (this, of course, is the real media bias... that and their fear of Rush Limbaugh calling them 'liberal'). But the candidates can. Gore and Kerry allowed themselves to be defined by their media narratives-- which far too often originate from conservative innuendo-- failing to counter them until it was too late. You can see in the way that Clinton, Edwards, Obama, and the rest operate now that they realized that and are much better at countering it. But this is the warm-up round... they'll need to be pros come general election season.

[PS- Digby has a great post looking back on the media, 1972, and Edmund Muskie.]