What You Really Want

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:20 AM

It's easy to blame the media for all that is wrong with campaign coverage in the 21st century, and I'm not shy about doing that.

But what if the problem is . . . you?

That's right. What if people are actually gorging on the silly and salacious stuff that they tell pollsters they don't want in their media diet?

But how could we know if that was the case? Hmmm. Let me think!

Aha! How about their online searches? The purest expression of their inner id, their secret curiosity, their lust for certain knowledge?

I didn't come up with this idea but was struck by what Slate dug up in examining the online behavior of the masses. And let me just say, they're not looking for details on eligibility for SCHIP:

" Wives matter: People want to get to know Elizabeth Kucinich. When you type 'dennis kucinich' into Google Suggest, you learn that more people are searching for 'dennis kucinich wife' than 'dennis kucinich for president.' What do they want to know about her? According to the suggestion results for her name, people are looking for 'pictures,' 'photos,' 'age,' 'hot,' and 'tongue.' (It's pierced.) The Republican field has a woman of choice, too: Three of the top 10 search queries after 'fred thompson' are wife-related. The query 'joe biden wife,' however, doesn't appear until the candidate's 10th result. Ouch.

" Dirty minds: Among Hillary Clinton's most popular searches is 'hillary clinton cleavage'--no doubt fueled by all the hard-hitting reporting on the subject. Of course, that's innocent compared with Rudy's most popular associations: Search for 'Rudy Giuliani' and three of the top 10 suggested queries are related to cross-dressing. Other results provide a glimpse into America's fantasies: If you type in 'obama,' three of the top 10 results are some variation on 'obama girl.' And why else would 'mitt romney larry craig' be such a popular search?

" God is great: Everyone knows Mitt Romney's religion: As expected, people are searching for 'mitt romney mormon.' But they're also curious--and mistaken, it seems--about Obama's beliefs. Type his name, and you see that 'barack obama muslim' and 'barack obama religion' are the second and fourth most-popular queries, respectively. Enter 'barack hussein' into the search field and up pops 'barack hussein obama a muslim wants to be our president.'

" Soft spots: Some search suggestions point out a candidate's weaknesses. 'John McCain age' is up there, as is 'john edwards house' and 'john edwards suv.' Joe Biden's search slate is pretty clean, save for the seventh suggestion, 'joe biden plagiarism.' It's a sad commentary on Chris Dodd's campaign that one of the most common Dodd queries is 'chris dodd fly,' which takes you to a video of the senator debating with a bug on his head."

Now how did I miss that?

So if the Googlers are peering at Elizabeth Kucinich's tongue and Hillary Clinton's chest, is that the fault of the MSM? Could it be argued that journalists put these subjects into play, thereby triggering the searches? In Hillary's case, maybe--it was The Washington Post's fashion writer who started it--but have news organizations devoted much coverage at all to Kucinich's red-haired wife? That must be viral.

My take on the CNBC debate: Fred Thompson was crisper and less laconic than many expected. He was the only candidate who could claim to be a union member (Screen Actors Guild). And he jabbed at Chris Matthews for suggesting he was long-winded (!) But Romney (who popped Rudy on taxes and got popped back), Giuliani (who kept unloading on Hillary) and McCain (who hit Bush for not asking wartime sacrifice from the country) are far more practiced at the format, and it showed.

The New York Times doesn't even lead with Thompson (imagine that):

"Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts tangled over taxes and government spending as the Republican presidential candidates debated today in Michigan, highlighting the way in which their increasingly fierce confrontation is starting to dominate the race for their party's nomination.

"The debate also marked the debut of Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee alongside his Republican rivals. Mr. Thompson often appeared unsmiling and less practiced than the eight others onstage with him, who had already met five times before today, but avoided any notable missteps and held his own on substantive exchanges over the economy and foreign policy.

"Mr. Thompson often found himself a bystander as Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Romney attacked one another -- or, just as frequently, went after Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, reflecting the eagerness of Republicans for a general election matchup against Mrs. Clinton, the New York Democrat who is leading in national polls."

The L.A. Times at least gets Fred at the top:

"Appearing in his first presidential debate, Fred D. Thompson today laid out a traditional Republican fiscal agenda as rivals Mitt Romney and Rudolph W. Giuliani sparred in one of their sharpest clashes of the campaign.

"Thompson, an actor and former Tennessee senator, appeared visibly nervous in the debate's opening moments, but displayed flashes of humor as the two-hour event, held in Dearborn, Mich., drew to a close."

Insta-reaction on the right: On National Review, E.M. Zanotti: "The general feeling around here is that Fred Thompson pulled out a narrow win over Rudy and McCain, though a few hardcore Mitt supporters are attributing that to low expectations. I have to disagree. Mitt looked scripted, and even if it was calculated, Fred looked free and easy by comparison, and stayed consistently on message. To be fair, Mitt is getting rave reviews as well."

Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti: "In fact, Thompson had a string of good lines at the end. Chris Matthews tried to get Thompson to flub the name of the Canadian prime minister, but Thompson knew who Stephen Harper is. Then, when asked his relationship with Harper, Thompson said: We get along fine -- We've never met. The audience laughed, and Thompson grinned widely. Never underestimate the power of political humor.

"One good debate doesn't make a campaign, but one bad debate can ruin a campaign. In my view, none of the top four candidates had a bad debate, though Romney came close when he said he would more or less cede command authority to his lawyers during a crisis involving the use of force."

The vice president's wife doesn't like the Romney coverage, as she tells the Washington Examiner's Bill Sammon:

"Second lady Lynne Cheney, a descendant of Mormons, is defending Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney against what she calls 'virulently anti-Mormon' criticism.

" 'I have been really astounded by the ferocity of some of the statements that people I would not expect to make have made about Mormonism,' Cheney told The Examiner in an interview.

"She said Slate magazine published an article by Jacob Weisberg 'that was just virulently anti-Mormon.' The December column branded Mormonism a 'fraud' and ridiculed Romney for believing in the 'whoppers' of church founder Joseph Smith, whom Weisberg called 'an obvious con man.'

"Cheney, who recounts her Mormon roots in a new book, 'Blue Skies, No Fences,' said there is more religious criticism of Romney than there was of his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, when he ran for president 40 years ago."

That is undoubtedly true. And I think the press has focused too much on Mitt's religion.

Is Obama disappointing the liberal pundits? He sure hasn't inspired Josh Marshall:

"For months I've been quietly hoping that Barack Obama would at least make a race of it with Hillary Clinton. So I was more than a little disappointed when all the metrics of conventional wisdom (in the wise and foolish senses) started showing Hillary leaving Obama in the dust and becoming the dominant frontrunner and presumptive nominee . . .

"Obama isn't so much running for the nomination in the sense of reaching out and taking it. He's trying to show us how marvelous he is (and this isn't snark, he's really pretty marvelous) so that Democratic voters will recognize it and give him the nomination.

"But that's not how it works in this country. I don't know if it really works otherwise anywhere else. But you have to really want it, come out and say it, take it. I thought about qualities that describe what is at issue. 'Toughness' seems to bound up in meta-national security mumbojumbo. 'Ruthlessness' sounds too, well, ruthless. You have to want it enough that you reach out and take it. Which isn't always pretty and admirable. But that's what it takes."

He may have broken with conservatives in backing John Kerry last time, but Andrew Sullivan just plain doesn't like Hillary. Now he's steamed that she is using Sandy Berger-- as an informal adviser:

"A thief and liar is hired by Clinton. But his thievery is less important to Clinton than his loyalty. After all, his theft was an attempt to keep president Clinton's failures with respect to al Qaeda under wraps. And so he gets a pardon. Remember: the Clintons are on their best behavior right now. And they still rehire their corrupted loyalists. Like the other royal family, the Clinton court exists to reward loyalty, protect the brand, circle the wagons and to punish dissenters. With post-Cheney executive powers, the potential for the Clinton machine to abuse their power more profoundly than in the 1990s is high.

"While I'm at it: Several of you have emailed claiming that my antipathy to the Clinton Restoration is a function of my discomfort with women in power. This argument is a little weak since my entire interest in politics was born out of an unhealthy devotion to the career and achievements of Margaret Thatcher, a truly powerful woman and a far more impressive feminist than Hillary Rodham Clinton."

And from the left, Kos remains unhappy with HRC:

"Many can't believe that Hillary is so damn stupid as to give George Bush a rationale for attacking Iran.

"She really didn't learn her lesson the first time. Is she seriously claiming that this resolution was really needed to 'lay the groundwork for using diplomacy and sanctions'? What, was Condi Rice (remember her?) hamstrung on her ability to conduct diplomacy without Congress giving her the thumbs up?

"Does she think her audience is that stupid? Apparently so. No wonder she won't apologize for screwing up the Iraq War Authorization. She sees nothing wrong with that vote, and has every intention of casting that kind of vote over and over again."

Slate's Jack Shafer takes note of a new book and a new noun:

" 'The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers was Thomas Jefferson's motto. Drew Curtis shares the sentiment to the extreme in his splenetic takedown of the press, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap As News, which came out late last spring.

"In 278 quick pages, It's Not News, It's Fark does more to advance the journalistic art than all the millions spent by the Poynter Institute, the Shorenstein Center, the Nieman Foundation, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the Columbia Journalism Review and the American Journalism Review, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the various Annenberg outposts, and the Freedom Forum, combined.

"Instead of urging journalists to raise their standards--the typical tack taken by the press-guardian-industrial complex--Curtis puts the onus on readers, insisting that they become better news consumers. The educated reader's top enemy is the 'filler' of non-news, he argues, which the mass media pumps out whenever there's not enough hard news to complete a newscast or fill a newspaper."

Of course, if people didn't like it, would media outlets spew it?

"Through this crack come the inaccurate, fear-mongering stories about germs, earthquakes, and potential terrorist attacks; the worthless formula stories hooked on changing seasons, hot-weather spells, shark attacks, and holiday traffic patterns--the media events generated by PR firms that reporters translate into news stories. Even when journalists do right they often go wrong, he writes, by pausing in the middle of well-reported pieces to give equal time--in the name of balance--to flat-earth 'nutjobs' (his word) who take the opposing view.

"All the garbage the press publishes and broadcasts when it runs out of genuine news is what Curtis calls 'fark' . . . High-octane blends of fark contain celebrity news, press coverage of itself, and news served in the context of no context. When Shepard Smith screens, say, five seconds of a burning skyscraper in Brazil, followed by five seconds of a cat rescue in Montana, followed by five seconds of a flood in Thailand on the Fox News Report," that's fark.

Here's a great kicker from Cenk Uygur on an audacious online appeal:

"Craigslist has produced many internet classics in our time. Personally, I have seen friends have unbelievable sexual liaisons through people they met secretly on Craigslist. I knew a girl who just put an ad out for a man to buy her a microwave and someone appeared at her door the next day with a free microwave. I'm not kidding. But this latest story might take the cake. An unabashed gold-digger in New York put an ad up on Craigslist asking to meet a man making over $500,000. She explained that men making just $250,000 wouldn't cut it:

" Okay, I'm tired of beating around the bush. I'm a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I'm articulate and classy. I'm not from New York. I'm looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don't think I'm overreaching at all. Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200-250. But that's where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250K won't get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she's not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

"My favorite part is when she tells us how 'classy' she is. Yes, this ad is nothing but classy. So, someone responded. And they let her have it. He explains in the beginning of the letter that he does meet her qualifications, as he is a man on Wall Street making over $500K. Then he tells her this: '[I]n economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset.' "

I'll be off the blogging trail the next couple of days as I hit the airwaves to talk about my book "Reality Show." Maybe I'll have some reflections next week on tangling with the likes of O'Reilly, Olbermann and Jon Stewart.