Sherry Chandler

The American Minitrue

Whether or not it means she can ever be the Democratic nominee for president, one thing I find encouraging about Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that she persists in pulling high percentages of votes despite the news media’s best efforts to stop her. Over and over, they tell us she can’t win and over and over the voters come out for her. In this one instance, for good or ill, voters seem to be thinking beyond the media narrative.

The fact is that our media has played a disgraceful role in our politics since the 2000 election.

At one time, I thought the left-wing blogs would be watchdogs against this journalism-as-infomercial but this year they have nearly all chosen to fall in behind their candidate of choice and enjoy the schadenfreude when the other guy was trashed. The candidates, too, have failed to a lesser or greater extent to call foul.

The last debate between Clinton and Obama, for example, was a travesty but either one or both of the candidates could have refused to play the game. Senator Clinton has been forced by public outcry to repudiate perceived racism from her supporters but Senator Obama has not repudiated very real sexism from his own.

The problem is, as I’ve said over and over here, when you allow this sort of thing to happen to your opponent, you cannot complain when it happens to you.

Gabor Steingart, Der Spiegel’s man in Washington D.C. can see it, if we cannot. Here is a clip from his article The Media’s Mini-Truths

The American public has not only been misled during this election campaign, but has also been fed a constant stream of irrelevant information. In one of his novels, the British writer, essayist and journalist George Orwell invented the Ministry of Truths, which he called “minitruths,” with which one would try to confuse the public with small parts of the truth that even when added up do not give the whole picture.

This is despite the fact that there is no shortage of relevant issues to discuss. The upcoming US presidential election should address issues of war, peace, and growing inequality created by the forces of globalization.

Many questions could be posed that are hard to beat in terms of drama. What would happen if the Democrats really were to withdraw the US Army from Iraq? How does Barack Obama plan to address the threat that the killing fields of Cambodia could be repeated in Basra and Baghdad? Does he have a plan or even an idea for dealing with the day after?

How do the Republicans plan to end the scandal of the uninsured? Some 47 million people in America now have no health insurance. Around 9 million have been added to that total during the seven years George W. Bush has been in power. This is the greatest market failure since the invention of modern capitalism.

But one cannot blame the journalists alone for the decline of journalism. Their importance has diminished more than in any other previous election. They now share newspaper pages and TV broadcasting time with people who call themselves strategists or consultants and who are either in the pay of a party now, or have been in the past.

Journalists and strategists deliver their commentaries, side by side and in harmony, on CNN and Fox News. Make way for Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush’s two electoral victories, who is now under contract with Fox News, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Raise the curtain for Dick Morris, once the closest adviser to Bill Clinton, who is a fixture on practically every TV channel. Cast the spotlight on Donna Brazile, who appears on CNN as a commentator on every election night — the audience only learns in passing that she is actually a member of the exclusive Democratic National Committee and one of her party’s superdelegates.

My thanks for FrenchDoc at Correntewire for highlighting this article. Read her fine post on the subject.

Thanks to our media, candidates are more and more likely to run content-free campaigns. Is it possible that people are voting for Clinton precisely because she is bucking this trend, her lack of money for television commercials forcing her to go directly to the people and present her policy positions? Whether her policies are wise or foolish, she has laid them out very specifically.

But I’ll admit that I am partisan.

I’m not sure what we should do about this problem. I quit watching television news long ago and I get most of my information from books and online newspapers, blogs, magazines, and streaming interview shows. This solution, though, holds a danger of creating silos and gated communities of opinion that will further splinter the country. We need a national news media we can trust, not a for-profit infotainment industry.

For now, I will comfort myself with the knowledge that not everybody believes everything Chris Matthews tells them.

Update: Digby on this subject.