Daily Howler on Dean's media coverage

Bob Somerby's Daily Howler website is a fantastic resource for cutting through the hypocrisy of the Pundit Class. His piece on the way Dean has been treated in the media is a great example of how he cuts right through the morass. To make his point, Somerby draws a distinction using Cohen's piece on Dean's death penalty stance as an example of how coverage should be:

Meanwhile, Cohen presents an original view! You haven’t seen thirty-five other pundits say precisely the same thing this week. By the standards of contemporary punditry, therefore, this is a startling piece of work. You may or may not agree with Cohen. But if this were the way our elections were covered, THE DAILY HOWLER wouldn’t exist. Neither, of course, would the Bush White House.

Because this is certainly not the way Campaign 2000 was covered. As ombudsman E. R. Shipp wrote in the Washington Post, the press corps essentially “typecast” that race, creating a mindless, hackneyed “drama” in which each candidate was “assigned a role” (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/7/00). Once the various roles were assigned, facts were persistently rearranged to fit the corps’ preferred scripts. “As a result of this approach,” Shipp wrote, “some candidates are whipping boys; others seem to get a free pass.” Sadly, that is how the press covered Campaign 2000. And, to judge by the coverage of Dean’s recent session, they’re ready to do it again.

Familiar figures are hard at work, banging out pleasing new scripts. For example, the morning after Dean’s appearance, Katharine Seelye got busy spinning in the New York Times. According to Seelye, Dean had “equivocated,” “sidestepped” and “guessed” his way through the Meet the Press performance. Most strikingly, Seelye pretended that Dean had “sidestepped” issues where he actually gave quite detailed replies. But readers would have no way to know that. Readers weren’t told what Dean had said, only what Seelye thought of his answers. This was “reporting” at its worst—the same type of crabbed “reporting” Seelye presented throughout Campaign 2000. In August 2000, the Financial Times nailed the Times spinner, saying she was “hostile to the [Gore] campaign, doing little to hide [her] contempt for the candidate.” It’s bad, bad news for American politics if Seelye is out there again.