Media Matters for America: Fri, Sep 5, 2008
A test for the media
On MSNBC on Thursday, Time's Jay Carney offered an assessment of the McCain campaign's most recent assault on the media: "Clearly, the campaign has decided that one way to win is to attack the media. Now, that could work. It does not have a great history of working. 'Annoy the Media: Re-Elect George Bush,' 1992 -- Bush got, I think, 39 percent of the vote or 37 percent of the vote." Carney didn't explicitly say it, but he seems to be under the impression that the point of the McCain campaign's attacks on the media is to win support from voters who dislike the media. And he seems to think the Republicans only occasionally wage a war on his profession.
In fact, it is a constant war, the point of which is not to merely win a few votes from people who dislike the media. The point is to make voters distrust the media, to make them believe the media are out to get conservatives and thus cause them to discount news reports that are unfavorable to conservatives, and to cow the media themselves into running fewer such reports. (It serves another purpose, too: It helps a nominee whose heiress wife shows up at the convention in an outfit estimated to cost $300,000 pretend to be a man of the people raging against the "elites." But that's a story better told elsewhere.)
And it does indeed have a great history of working. No, it has a spectacularly successful history of working -- of helping conservatives win both short-term and long-term victories. Don't take my word for it: Longtime Washington Post reporter Tom Edsall, now of The Huffington Post, has explained:
"The conservative movement has been very effective attacking the media (broadcast and print) for its liberal biases. The refusal of the media to disclose and discuss the ideological leanings of reporters and editors, and the broader claim of objectivity, has made the press overly anxious, and inclined to lean over backwards not to offend critics from the right. In many respects, the campaign against the media has been more than a victory: it has turned the press into an unwilling, and often unknowing, ally of the right."...
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The McCain campaign's war against the media shouldn't be surprising; this is what conservatives do. The only real question is what reporters are going to do about it....Are they going to cower in the face of right-wing bullying as they have so many times in the past? It's hard to imagine that they won't....
Joe Klein -- who has, in the past, been awfully kind to McCain -- urged fellow reporters not to back down in the face of the barrage of criticism from the right:
"There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is 'a task from God.' The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme."...
http://mediamatters.org/items/200809050021?f=h_latest 
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