Running Against the Media

We have achieved a rare moment of consensus in the media.

Everyone hates us.

Or at least, everyone agrees that we have screwed up this election pretty royally.

Even Rudy Giuliani is running against the pundits with this ad. Dana Milbank appears twice.

But there's been a fascinating turn in the debate, which I briefly mentioned yesterday. It's not just the blown predictions, endless punditry and horse-race mentality that are aggravating people about the news business. Now some critics are saying that the pundits themselves have become a factor in this race, especially in the perceived piling on against Hillary Clinton.

To be sure, the press is an easy target for a candidate's campaign when things are going wrong. But I think there's something to the backlash argument. It may be a minor factor, but a factor nonetheless.

Salon's Joe Conason points the finger at his profession in trying to explain Hillary's win on Tuesday:

"What seems just as plausible as any other explanation is also the most ironic: that New Hampshire Democrats -- and especially Democratic women -- were sick of the corrosive hostility and naked slant of the mainstream media against her.

"The polls that had showed Barack Obama well ahead of Clinton were not so much wrong as misleading -- or at least badly interpreted by journalists too eager to write Clinton's political obituary. In fact, the polls correctly measured Obama's share of the vote. What happened during the contest's last few days was that the undecided broke for Clinton, and the question is why.

"Without depriving her and her campaign team of any credit they deserve for her late revival, it seems quite possible that all the cheap shots and hate bombs finally backfired on Clinton's aggressive adversaries in the media.

"Does anyone still doubt that many of the most influential members of the national press corps dislike Hillary Clinton and treat her accordingly? Bias is far too mild a term to describe the bullying she has endured on cable television as well as in print. Indeed, prejudice against her is evidently so ingrained in the culture of the political media by now that the most inflamed commentators and journalists no longer feel constrained to conceal their emotions in the name of objectivity. During the current primary season, the disparity in her treatment compared with that of her rivals -- especially the indulgent and even adoring coverage of Obama -- became simply too obvious to ignore."

Conason points to a comment by Dana Milbank on my show: "The press will savage her no matter what, pretty much. There's no question they have their knives out for her."