Through The Lens Darkly

[illinoisprogressive]

the Nation has a great article by Eric Alterman about how the media plays games, twists and decides narrative on Presidential Candidates, most of it malicious and untrue.


For the people who cover them for a living, elections are not about issues or evidence or even truth; they are about the narrative. Campaigns struggle to define it long before voters are paying attention--because once the narrative is determined, it's virtually impervious to revision. This was the case with the "Gore's a liar; Bush is a dope" story line of the 2000 election. As Margaret Carlson--then of Time--explained to Don Imus, "You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas...but it's really easy, and it's fun, to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us."

Each year's election narrative is determined by the bigfoot correspondents and the top tier of the punditocracy and then reinforced by everyone else. It works best with a conservative spin because of the recent right-wing takeover of so many of these perches, owing to the power of Drudge, talk-radio and cable TV. But it is determined in places like Time, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post. To get an idea of how the process works, take a look at the coverage of John Edwards's campaign. In an alleged news story, "Edwards Talks Tough on Hedge Funds," Times reporter Leslie Wayne observed, "Mr. Edwards has made poverty his signature issue, a topic that stands in sharp contrast to his own $30 million net worth." Wayne and her editors apparently think there's a "sharp contrast" between a man being wealthy and his expressing concern for the poor. It's a constant theme of the Edwards coverage. The Post, for instance, devoted breathless front-page coverage to the sale of Edwards's house. Bill Hamilton, a Post editor, defended this decision to the paper's ombudsman by explaining that Edwards was a "presidential candidate just happens to be a millionaire who is basing his campaign on a populist appeal to the common man."

The unmistakable implication is that poor people have no right to representation in our society. No one mocks Mitt Romney for promoting policies that protect his more than $250 million net worth. Ditto Rudy Giuliani, who pocketed more than $16 million last year alone. But as Fox's Neil Cavuto puts it, "The GOP guys are not pretending to be, you know, great poor advocates." Since actual poor people are de facto disqualified from running for President by Congress's refusal to institute the kind of publicly financed elections that are the rule in most democracies, the result is that we allow representation only of the rich, by the rich.

for the rest of the article
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071001/alterman