Metaphor Reporting

by digby

I realize that the WaPo’s Chris Cilliza is writing a blog and not writing for the paper, but I think it’s still worth looking at how he approaches the Rudy Giuliani/NYC Firefighters stand-off to get an idea of how these sorts of things are seen by the DC press corps.

Here’s part of what Cilizza wrote yesterday:

Giuliani’s campaign knows that if the video catches on in the world of YouTube and Drudge it could get out of control very quickly. By seeking to discredit the messenger before the video even hits the Internet, the Giuliani campaign hopes it can deaden the impact before it has a chance to grow.

The next 48 hours will show whether their strategy worked.

Really? That’s all it takes?

Again, I recognize that Cilizza is observing the political aspect of the thing and is not actually required to delve into the substance of the matter in every post. (I would hope that someone in the press corps is, however.) But the way he frames it automatically puts it into the category of a Swift Boat smear, which could be completely wrong. (The fact that it’s being put out in a viral video is meaningless — the Swift Boaters put theirs on TV and then got a ton of free air time. The method isn’t important.) Ultimately, it’s the quality of the charges, and Cilizza has already made the firefighters’ charges suspect by putting it in this context.

Most importantly, he’s framed the whole issue as one of how well the campaign “pre-butted” the charge, rather than if the charge is actually true. And this one isn’t hard to evaluate on the merits. It didn’t happen on the Mekong delta 35 years ago — it happened in NY city six years ago. There’s no reason that this should be accepted as a meaningful “test” for Giuliani, certainly not by the press, whose job it is to gather the facts and tell us what they are.

But for some reason, the media has come to habitually weigh the prospective competence and leadership qualities of candidates on the basis of how well they thwart smears. This stands in for real questions of leadership and competence, even in the case of Giuliani, whose entire rationale for running rests on his leadership and competence on 9/11 — and which is being attacked specifically in this ad. There is no need to substitute his campaign’s response for the real thing.

In the larger sense, this is another example of the impulse on the part of political journalists to find metaphors when reality is staring them in the face. I don’t know if it’s a tick or if they simply don’t see that they are missing the point. In this case, it is crystal clear. How Giuliani responds to a viral video is meaningless. How he responds to fetid, poisonous air and the recovery of dead bodies after a terrorist attack isn’t. There’s no need to go looking for hints of whether he’ll be a good president by looking at his campaign operation’s competence at rebutting charges. Just go to New York and do some reporting.

.