Running Against the Media

"Did voters take notice of this appalling phenomenon? More likely they have grown accustomed to the nastiness and pettiness of powerful anchors and columnists as a kind of background noise. But over the past several weeks, with Clinton seeming to slip and flounder amid the groundswell of enthusiasm for Obama, there came a crescendo of full-throated glee from the campaign press corps. Among journalists there, the intensity of schadenfreude over the stumbling of the Clinton camp, according to one observer in New Hampshire, was verging on 'sadism.' "

An important piece by the top editors of Politico, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, doesn't spare them from criticism -- and works its way around to Hillary:

"If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools.

"Let's look back at some of the bogus narratives of this election so far. There was the 'John McCain is dead' storyline from last summer. Weak fundraising, poor polls, a backlash from conservatives and staff disarray had doomed his candidacy. Nevermind.

"Then there was Iowa. The caucuses, we wrote, are all about organization. Except they were won on the Republican side by Mike Huckabee, who had only the barest-bones organization. D'oh!

"Or Barack Obama. The reason his candidacy was not taking flight, as the wisdom had it last fall, was that he was preaching a bland message of unity and civility in a year when Democrats were eager for a sharper, more confrontational and more partisan message. Guess not. These were only appetizers to the main course of humiliation. After a barrage of coverage that all but anointed Obama as the New Hampshire winner and declared him the clear front-runner for the nomination, that exercise in group think was stopped cold by the actual votes. Whoops. Looks like we have a trend here.

"Our own publication, Politico, did its part in promoting several of these flimsy storylines. We used predictive language in stories. We amplified certain trends and muffled the caveat, which perhaps should be printed with every story, like a surgeon general's warning: 'We don't know what will happen until voters vote.' . . .

"Horse race frenzy: We are addicts. Do not listen to any reporter who says otherwise. It is why reporters leave their homes, spouses and families for long stretches to cram into crummy hotels and smelly buses to cover campaigns."

They also tackle the bias question: "Many are sympathetic to Obama's argument that the culture of Washington politics is fundamentally broken . . . [Hillary] is carrying the burden of 16 years of contentious relations between the Clintons and the news media. Many journalists rushed with unseemly haste to the narrative about the fall of the Clinton machine.

"On this score, reporters are recidivists. The Clintons were finished in 1992, when Bill Clinton's New Hampshire campaign was rocked by scandal. In 1993, when Time pronounced him 'The Incredible Shrinking President.' In 1994, when Hillary Clinton botched health care and Democrats lost Congress. In 1995, when Bill Clinton pleaded he still had 'relevance.' In 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal sent the Clinton presidency reeling. Hillary Clinton's comeback in New Hampshire this week probably shared a trait in common with those earlier episodes: The media frenzy itself became part of the story, contributing to a sense of piling on and making people more sympathetic to the candidate."

Time's Joe Klein likes the New Hillary, and doesn't spare the media:

"If she is smart -- smarter about herself than she has been in the past -- she will continue to run her campaign in the open, as she did the last few days in New Hampshire, answering questions from the press and public, allowing her humor (and a bit of anger) to shine. She will, finally, trust her own instincts and stop relying so much on polls and market testing. A big election like this one is won on macrovision, not the microtrends that her strategist Mark Penn keeps touting . . .