Obama Abroad: We Get the Picture; The Candidate Looked Good This Week. Did the Press?

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Obama Abroad: We Get the Picture
The Candidate Looked Good This Week. Did the Press?
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 25, 2008; C01

After saying little in public during a weekend in Iraq and Afghanistan, Barack Obama met with traveling reporters near Jordan's Temple of Hercules, a gladiator standing his ground against the media hordes. But even as the likes of NBC's Andrea Mitchell and ABC's Jake Tapper rose to press the Democratic candidate on Tuesday, television viewers back home heard nothing but faint voices in the wind. The journalists weren't miked; only Obama's answers came through loud and clear.

That may have been unintentional, but it underscored the degree to which Obama has controlled the message -- and, more important, the pictures -- during his exhaustively chronicled trek across the Middle East and Europe. Obama meeting the troops, meeting the generals, meeting prime ministers and kings, drawing a huge crowd in Berlin yesterday -- the images trump whatever journalists write and say....

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Beyond the images, most journalists and pundits have depicted the trip as an unalloyed triumph. "A slam-dunk success," in the words of Time's Joe Klein; "a real grand slam," as Salon Editor Joan Walsh put it on "Hardball."...

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While the scene looked cozy, the reporters asked substantive foreign-policy questions in more formal settings. And the three network anchors, whose presence came to symbolize complaints that the media were blanketing the trip as if it were a state visit, earned their paychecks....All three newscasts, whether out of guilt or a sense of fairness, also featured interviews with McCain....

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Still, the tone of the coverage sometimes bordered on gushing, as in this Associated Press dispatch before the appearance in Berlin: "In this city where John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all made famous speeches, Obama will find himself stepping into perhaps another iconic moment Thursday as his superstar charisma meets German adoration live in shadows of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. He then travels to Paris and London where he can expect to be greeted with similar adulation. It's not only Obama's youth, eloquence and energy that have stolen hearts across the Atlantic. . . . Obama has raised expectations of a chance for the nation to redeem itself."

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Some journalists defend the coverage as a matter of marketing: Obama is hot, McCain is not....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/24/AR2008072403924_pf.html

[TwilightGardener]

1. Howie Kurtz--still trying to make the media the story. That's his whole fucking job.

[truedelphi]

2. He is not only charismatic, but he is charismatic and articulate

While following eight years of George-I can-hardly-say-a-word-without-biting-my-tongue Bush, it is hard for voters to not fall for him.