There is much more on link
http://dailyhowler.com/<snip>
First: Yes! Candidate Bush did “get within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency” because of the bad media habits Krugman discusses this morning. This very week, we got an e-mail saying that the Bob Herberts of the world didn’t send Bush to the White House; everyone knows that Chief Justice Rehnquist’s Supreme Court did that, our e-mailer said. But Campaign 2000 would never have been reached the Court if the press corps hadn’t misbehaved, for two years, in the manner Krugman describes. Will we ever get the simplest parts of this logic clear in our heads? If we have to wait for help from our “liberal” journals, the answer is clear on that: No.
Second: Krugman focuses on Bush’s October 3 misstatements about the shape of his budget plan. Without any doubt, Bush’s misstatements on this topic that evening were vast—and Krugman had explained this material in his columns three times in the previous month, quite heroically. (His colleagues almost wholly ignored him.) But let’s be sure we’re clear on our history: Bush also made endless, howling misstatements that night about his own prescription drug plan. Indeed, Bush and Gore’s exchange on that high-interest subject may have been the longest and most dramatic exchange in presidential debate history. (For a fuller discussion, see links below.) Repeatedly, Bush said or implied that Gore was lying—as Gore correctly described Bush’s plan. But as with the tax plan, so with the drugs; “few news reports pointed out” these humongous misstatements by Bush. Amazingly, the New York Times never told readers who had been right on the facts.
Third: We’ll quibble with Krugman on one point only—on his statement that the “news media failure” in Campaign 2000 was “as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.” There are many ways to compare such episodes, but we’d have to say the press corps’ misconduct was actually worse during Campaign 2000. Yes, the press corps failed in some ways in the run to Iraq, and some of the work was egregious, or close to it. But these were largely failures of omission and emphasis—and the true story about Iraq was fairly hard to get at that time. In Campaign 2000, by contrast, the press corps simply invented bogus stories for twenty straight months, repeating them in near-perfect unison. Regarding Iraq, the result was the same; when the press corps kept Gore from the White House, they pretty much doomed us to war with Iraq. But the misconduct was much more willful in 1999 and 2000 than it would be in the run to Iraq. But so what? To this very day, Krugman is the only journalist on his level who is willing to discuss this crucial part of our recent history. Don’t turn to Bob Herbert or Joe Klein. And don’t waste your time waiting for E. J.
So Oh. Our. God! How the analysts cheered today, when Krugman told readers that they “should remember” the press corps breakdown after that crucial debate. They cheered because Campaign 2000 is part of a 15-year story—a story voters must understand if they hope to understand their own politics. Indeed, Eric Boehlert and Jamison Foser have been telling an earlier part of that story in the past two weeks, in their superlative work at Media Matters; our analysts have cheered their postings too. Here’s the shape of that 15-year story—the story the “press” refuses to tell, the story the public must fathom:
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