Campaign '04 Coverage

Our media blows here in the states. If you don't live here then you don't know. Maybe you do live here but don't think about it because you've just grown used to it. At any rate, I think that they are in large part responsible for the Bush victory. Here is small, not at all exhaustive list of the areas where I believe the media failed us as a nation in this campaign.

1. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth The smear leveled at John Kerry by these guys will go down in history as one the most dishonest and damaging in American political history. It goes without saying that these guys deserve our contempt for their tactics and the results of those tactics. Coming after the Democratic National Convention, these dishonest attacks hurt Kerry in the polls and damaged his ability to use his heroic war record to outline to the American public his suitability as a Commander in Chief during war-time. He could not effectively make this argument after the Swift Boat Liars. The punditry all agreed: “Stop talking about’Nam.†The Swift Boat liars had poisoned the well, so to speak.

What happened was the result of shrewd political calculations by pro-Bush factions. Ideally, leveling a libelous smear at a respected public figure should be an unwise move for political partisans. It would have been in this case had the media done its job. Upon the beginning of the Swift Boats smear, the media faced a choice:

denounce the attacks as unsubstantiated and politically motivated, expose the links between the White House and the authors of the smear, and put pressure on the White House to explicitly denounce the smear. If Bush refused to denounce the group, then his refusal to distance himself from a dishonest smear from which he benefited should have been the story.

-or-

air stories about the SVFT that give their smears even more exposure thus further damaging Kerry’s candidacy, allow pundits (a largely conservative and covertly partisan lot) to further publicize and tacitly or explicitly endorse the story, and to have people debate the merits of their charges thereby turning the whole affair into a he said/ she said affair where reality can only be subjective.

Of course the media went the second route. The calculations of Karl Rove and company turned out to be correct. John Kerry could never completely re-establish himself as a strong military leader according to the pundits or apparently the few million swing voters who went for a second helping of Dubya.

2. Rathergate For all the conservative griping about the “liberal media†was any media personality this year as useful to the GOP as Dan Rather? He single handedly knocked the story of Bush’s disgraceful Texas Air Guard service off the political radar and gave the conservatives a ready made straw man to publicly flog for displaying that “pervasive liberal media bias.†The substance of the 60 minutes story could not be impugned yet the story still vanished.

I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but I have to wonder if Rove and company didn’t create those documents. And for that matter, is Rather himself on the take? He is a Texan and he did help the GOP considerably, both by creating a scandal involving the “liberal media†and by giving talking heads something to yak about that did not involve the bad economy or the latest decapitations in Iraq. I’m not saying it was a conspiracy, but it does seem like the kind of dirty trick that Rove is (in)famous for.

3. Howard Dean I don’t know how things would have gone for Dean in a national campaign. His wife and his temper may have hurt him, but we’ll never know. My question is, why was the scream aired over and over? Why does that get aired incessantly while we don’t see clips of the president saying things like “a peeance freeance secure Iraq?†or blatantly dodging questions about why he would only testify in front of two 9/11 Commission members with no cameras or stenographers present and with Uncle Dick Cheney holding his hand. Why don’t we see his stammering when asked to cop to a single mistake committed during his presidency? I don’t know why. Maybe a media spokesperson could explain this to me.

4. World Opinion Not many Americans are aware of the fact that only Israel and America have populations in which the majority support the Iraq war. Nor were Americans aware that majorities in the whole world minus Poland and Israel and maybe Russia were wanting Bush to be defeated. I don’t necessarily think that the world should be given a vote in our presidential elections, but when world opinion comes down so lopsidedly against one candidate, it should at least create some ripples in the national media.

5. Opinion of the Muslim World I’ve seen polls in the International Herald Tribune showing that American prestige is at an all time low in the Muslim World these days. This is due presumably to our conquering of Iraq and the ensuing Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal. This should be all over the media and is a powerful indictment against the Bush Administration. He is perceived by many as the national Daddy/protector. How does the public reconcile record levels of extremism-fueling anti-Americanism in the Muslim World with their belief that Bush has made us safer? They don’t have to reconcile these issues because the media doesn’t force them to. We will we be dealing with the blowback from Bush’s policies for a generation. The American press may be done with the images of Abu Ghraib, but they aren’t done with us.

6. Widespread Misinformation In a recent New York Times Op-Ed column, Bob Herbert pointed out that 70% of Bush supporters believe that there is “clear evidence†proving that Saddam Hussein worked closely with al Qaeda. A third of Bush supporters believe that WMD have been found in Iraq. When such a large percentage of American voters are so misinformed about matters of extreme importance, it is a news story in and of itself. But we don’t hear a peep about it in from the national media outside the odd Op-Ed column. The widespread misinformation also reflects what a bad job the media does in informing the electorate in the first place.

Presidential candidates are dependent upon the media to reach the American public. When one takes into account the media coverage of political events during this past Presidential campaign, one begins to feel a little more sympathy for John Kerry. When the media refuses to practice actual journalism, an intellectually lazy public is left to try to discern objective reality on their own. Reality, here and around the world, made Bush’s failures obvious. The blame for so many Americans failing to grasp reality must be laid at the feet of those whose job it is to keep Americans abreast of reality. Bush and the media turned this election into a referendum, not of the policies of a catastrophic failure of a sitting president, but of Karl Rove’s caricature of John Kerry. How fucked is that?