As always, I HIGHLY recommend you use the link to the original article rather than just reading this excerpt I'm about to post. For one thing, it's easer to read, and for another, no one should judge an entire article (that's not all that long) based on an excerpt. And if that didn't convince you, the original article has a bunch of hyperlinks that add to the story.
And if you're a Hillary supporter and you've come to despise Cenk and The Young Turks, I encourage you to watch today's show. Cenk is off, and *staunch Hillary supporter* Michael Shure will be guest hosting starting at 3pm EST at www.theyoungturks.com to give his perspective.
Sadly, I know many people won't listen and will instead just respond to the following excerpt, or even worse, to the the subject line. Oh well, and so it goes...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/hillary-whines-to-the-ref_b_91814.html"...We recently had Mary Mapes on our show. She is, of course, the producer of the 60 Minutes piece on George Bush's National Guard duty. This was a classic case of media overreaction when the Republicans whined to the refs.
Yes, you can have legitimate journalistic concerns over whether they should have run the one document they did not have enough verification on. But the heart of the story stands, even after a thorough CBS investigation into the report led by Republican stalwart Dick Thornburgh. But after this 60 Minutes story, no one ever dared to challenge Bush on whether he showed up to the National Guard in Alabama, although it appears he almost certainly did not.
But that's not why I bring this up. After I asked about how cowed the media is by Republican attacks, I asked one more question: Does the media ever give any pause before doing a similar story on Democrats?
The answer: "No, no, no." (You can get the transcript and the interview here or the short version on You Tube)
When it's Republicans, you better be prepared for a blistering counter-attack. When it's Democrats, unload on them because they never hold you accountable.
Now, to Hillary Clinton's credit, she doesn't accept this paradigm. She is fully aware of this game and knows how to play it with the best of them. And I say this with utter ambivalence. On the one hand, I like that she has successfully adapted Republican political tactics that work. On the other hand, I am uncomfortable with the idea that the media is getting played by her as much as they do by the Republicans.
Look at what she has done in these primaries. Every time she has been attacked, she plays the victim card. She says the media is biased against her. So, now when a news organization goes to cover Senator Clinton, they think twice.
Now, I think there have been times when her claims of bias have been justified (I've written about Chris Matthews in regards to this before
http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2008/01/10/why-chris-matthews-hates-hillary-clinton/). But the media has to be able to discern the difference between legitimate problems in their coverage and political gamesmanship. Of course, the media won't be perfect in covering every candidate (not by a long shot, see Al Gore). They have to be open to criticism without getting bullied.
The Clinton team went from having legitimate concerns about their treatment in the press to aggressively intimidating the media into favorable coverage a long time ago. I thought her references to the Saturday Night Live skit in one of the debates was silly. But I was wrong. It was awkward at the time, but it got the job done. That marked a turning point when the press got gun shy in going after Hillary. They didn't want to get stuck with the anti-Hillary bias tag. They got scared of what SNL or the Clinton team was going to say about them.
What's going through the head of everyone from MSNBC all the way down to the local paper is, "If I say that about Hillary Clinton, am I going to get in trouble? Will her campaign accuse me of having an anti-Hillary bias?"
Do they have similar pause when they are about to ask Barack Obama to apologize for Louis Farrakhan, a man he has no connection to (let alone when Tim Russert asked him about comments made by Harry Belafonte, presumably because they are both black -- what's next, asking him to reject and denounce OJ)?
Did they have similar pause when they couldn't stop talking about John Edwards's haircut (was there a dumber "issue" in this whole campaign)? Did any of the other candidates put out this talking point that the media better be careful what they say about them because they will cry and whine about it?
Now you can say, maybe they should have. And I hear you on that. If I was running a campaign, I wouldn't unilaterally disarm. I would complain bitterly about anti-Cenk bias until I made every press outlet think eight times before they ran a negative story about me. One of the advantages of this strategy is that many stories don't run based on this line of attack simply because people and organizations don't want to go through the hassle and work of jumping through all these hoops to run a simple story. Hence, you have less stories against the candidate who complains more.
Until the press catches on to what the Republicans have been doing for so long and what Senator Clinton has been doing of late, I would whine to the refs like all the rest of them to balance out the playing field. The media has to recognize this and learn how to ignore this kind of b.s. whining (without being close-minded about legitimate criticism).
When Sam Donaldson was on our show, he said that whenever either party complained to his boss, Roone Arledge, about how he was covering the Reagan or Clinton White House, Arledge would give him a raise. That's the spirit of watchdog journalism we have to get back to (and we probably will -- as soon as there is another Democrat in office (man, that's frustrating; but I'll take it if they at least cover the Republicans in Congress and the right-wing media with the same scrutiny)).
Why do I point this out now? Because I think there is a very specific issue that the press is not covering nearly enough at this point because of exactly this kind of intimidation. This primary race is over. Hillary Clinton cannot possibly catch Obama in pledged delegates. So, in order to win, she would have to overturn the will of the voters through superdelegates or some other form of political machinations.
So, why isn't the press reporting that it's over, that she can't possibly make a comeback in the remaining elections? Because they don't want to say it's over and have the wrath of Senator Clinton come down on their heads. The Clinton camp would whine about a story like that forever. They would charge that the press is trying to short-circuit the process, have always been biased against Hillary, yada, yada, yada..."
FOR THE REST, PLEASE CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/hillary-whines-to-the-ref_b_91814.html
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