Yes, the media does unnaturally fixate on certain candidates and all but ignore others. I am sure others here will expound on this.
That said, I find it hard to have any sympathy for Hillary. There were other candidates running for nominations (Gravel and Kucinich on the D side, and possibly Dodd, Biden, as well as Hunter, Tancredo, Paul, etc on the opposite side of the aisle) who did not receive nearly the same attention as she did. Later in the campaign Gravel and Kucinich were even excluded from the debates where she faced off against Obama and Edwards despite the fact that they were still on the ballot and likely played to the anti-war segment of the Democratic party.
Where was she when Gravel and Kucinich got ignored? If media bias is such a bad thing, how come she did not speak up for them? Wasn't her campaign the one that was trying to build up the "aura of inevitability" around it to crush anybody else who dared seek the nomination? If she had done so successfully, do you think she'd be complaining that Obama, Gravel, Richardson, Dodd, Edwards, etc didn't get the attention they deserved because she'd been preemptively anointed the nominee by the mass media?
Sucks that you can't have it both ways, eh, Hillary?
As I recall Edwards made the same charge when virtually all media coverage was focused on Obama/Clinton prior to him dropping out. If you want to reach people, you need to find a way (to use a bushism) to catapult the media. The internet as an example provides every presidential candidate with quite the bully pulpit.
However - if you want to spin the media and are not so concerned about people; then by all means charge the media with bias.
Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.
So, yeah, we're in the middle of (imagine your local "Crazy Eddie" car dealer's voice here) O-Ba-Ma-Maaa-nia. And I guess that's gotta irk the Clinton camp a bit, but then thems the breaks right.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
And by that I'm thinking back to the early part of the election cycle when all I seemed to hear from the media was how Clinton would win handily and people were trying to decide which among the Republican candidates would offer up a better matchup. There was scant coverage of any of the other Democratic runners. Clinton this, Clinton that. My reality, however, was that I saw very, very few people who outright supported Clinton in anything I was reading online. And I knew absolutely no one in real life that supported her. As far as I was concerned Clinton's popularity was constructed by the media. So if the support wasn't really there to begin with, what's she complaining about now?
15
 11
|
The Freak Show
Tue Mar 04, 2008 at 11:46:09 AM EST
|
Well, what you say is true, for the most part, but why it's true is more interesting to me. Was Hillary being hyped as "inevitable"? Sure, because that was what had worked for Bush in 2000, getting him past initial (and lasting!) doubts about what he'd really do in office; with Clinton redux having a serious problem with her base to overcome, it looked like a good strategy to scare other candidates out of the race-- and helped sell advertising at a time when anyone with any memory knew that the real campaign wasn't going to start for another year or two.
What shouldn't be overlooked either is how much this helped conservatives as well as Republicans, especially in the White House. If Bush was unpopular, and subject to ever increasing attacks from his right flank . . well, post a story about Hillary winning in 2008, and hope that specter helped keep some folks inside the tent. Which was why outlets like Fox News, who are staffed with folks who would have liked to see Clinton leave the stage for good didn't counteract the dominant meme, even though- especially though!- they knew "inevitable" was a bunch of hooey. Didn't hurt the fund raising either, I'd bet.
Was there real support for Hillary? I dunno. Guess I'd turn the question around and ask how much "genuine" support you've ever heard for McCain. Is there really a groundswell of support out there for the man who ran as "the new thing" for the first time eight years ago? Yet he's poised to take the nomination, beating handily two candidates who were sometimes described as "better" in the media. (And remember all that talk about Rudy being a major player? Heh.) So I'm hesitant to say that all the early talk about Clinton sweeping to the nomination was premature-- the question being not whether someone would bleed for a candidate, but rather whether they'd vote for him or her. In that regard, the early hype for Hillary looks a lot better, at least IMHO.
Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras
the fourth estate?
It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.
Well, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of Hillary just lately. For the longest, I was happy with either her or Obama getting elected. But her current behavior, with the mudslinging at Obama and the Rovian attitude of "win at any cost" makes me wonder whether she's the right candidate.
On the other hand, if you believe David Brock's 2002 book Blinded By The Right, Hillary had every right to claim "a vast right-wing conspiracy." And with evidence of Hillary-haters easy to find (a.k.a. "Clinton Derangement Syndrome"), you can see why Hillary might be more sensitive toward evidence of a media bias against her.
And the evidence does seem to lean in her favor on the subject. I'll leave it to the evidence in the linkariffic writeup to say yay or nay.
Doesn't say I'll vote for her over Obama. I think that her behavior lately speaks to her character a lot more than the nasty things being said by the media types.
It's like "Night of the Living Republican." The idiots are right outside, and they want to eat your brain.
