Reporter, Heal Thyself

by digby

In case you missed it, here’s a mea culpa from the Politico for their lousy coverage of the campaign so far.

A few observations. First they admit that the blogs they read everyday are Drudge, Real Clear Politics and TIME’s The Page every day. These are all conservative and/or establishment “blogs.” Make of that what you will.

Second, and more importantly:

NBC’s Brian Williams stirred some controversy earlier in the week when he reported that his network’s correspondent covering Obama admitted it was hard to be objective covering the Illinois senator. Reporters are human, and some did seem swept up in the same emotions many voters experienced when they saw a black man win snow-white Iowa by preaching a gospel of change. Many are sympathetic to Obama’s argument that the culture of Washington politics is fundamentally broken

The first part of that is an unexceptional observation. Reporters are human and they very well could get caught up in the moment like anyone else. It’s the final sentence that brought me up short. If the culture of politics is fundamentally broken it’s largely due to the performance of the media, which the Politico, with no self awareness, goes on to prove:

Hillary Clinton, cautious and scripted, got the reverse treatment. She is carrying the burden of 16 years of contentious relations between the Clintons and the news media.

Many journalists rushed with unseemly haste to the narrative about the fall of the Clinton machine. On this score, reporters are recidivists. The Clintons were finished in 1992, when Bill Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign was rocked by scandal. In 1993, when Time pronounced him “The Incredible Shrinking President.” In 1994, when Hillary Clinton botched health care and Democrats lost Congress. In 1995, when Bill Clinton pleaded he still had “relevance.” In 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal sent the Clinton presidency reeling.

Hillary Clinton’s comeback in New Hampshire this week probably shared a trait in common with those earlier episodes: The media frenzy itself became part of the story, contributing to a sense of piling on and making people more sympathetic to the candidate.

They just hit a few of the highlights of egregious Clinton coverage, but it speaks for itself anyway. It wasn’t just that they wrote the Clinton obituaries over and over again, it’s that when they weren’t working hand in glove with the right wing to pimp their well-financed trumped up scandals, they were busily devising new rules and moving the goalposts (which we all naively expected them to maintain once Bush seized office, and were sorely disappointed.) Over and over again the public rejected them, in my opinion, because they were so often trivial and so often accompanied by the unctuous schadenfreude that was dripping off the press corps last week.

And then there were Gore and Kerry, both of whom were also treated like dirt by the media to the point where they quit presidential politics. (It’s possible that the thing the media hates most about the Clintons is that they haven’t been run out of town yet.)

Whatever it is, if the reporters are worried that politics in Washington are broken, they don’t need anyone else to come in and fix it. There’s nothing more infuriating that listening to a bunch of beltway kewl kidz bemoan the state of politics in one breath and then immediately launch into some puerile psychoanalysis based on superficial observations about “style” and “tone.” If they “fixed” themselves, it would go a long way toward solving the problem.

*I should add that this article seems to be ingenuous and I don’t mean to be overly cynical. But I’m still not sure they really get what the problem is. Time will tell.

Update: I just heard a reporter on CNN say that the racial controversy this week-end came about because of comments about Martin Luther King being gassed and comparisons to John F. Kennedy Jr. You can’t make this stuff up.

.