The Media's Clinton-Obama Obsession ---- Make it Stop!

The media's Clinton-Obama obsession - make it stop!

By Eric Boehlert

Created Jan 23 2007 - 9:06am

The arrival of my year-end issue of Newsweek in December was accompanied by

a palpable sense of dread. Featuring Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary

Rodham Clinton (D-NY) on the cover [0] with the headline, "The Race is On,"

the issue landed with a thud, like an unwanted fruitcake amidst the holiday

season. How else to respond to a 2008 campaign preview package published 98

weeks before Election Day and nearly 400 days before a single registered

Democrat would vote in a primary? That, plus the fact the 2008 drumbeat was

sounding just six weeks after the all-consuming midterm elections had been

completed.

Am I the only one who thinks it's madness to turn White House campaigns into

22-month press events? Or it sacrosanct along the New York-Washington, D.C.,

media corridor, where pontificating about politics can pay very well, to

suggest that there is such a thing as too much mainstream media election

coverage?

The press truly has embraced the notion of the nonstop campaign and I think

has done so for increasingly selfish reasons. For political scribes,

presidential campaigns used to be the sports car their parents let them take

out for a spin once every four years to show off. Now it's become a case of

incessant cruising, with endless preening and posing. Specifically, White

House campaigns can be career-making seasons, when high-profile promotions,

book deals, TV punditry contracts, and teaching positions can be pocketed.

For news media companies, presidential campaigns meanbig business;

relatively inexpensive content that can be endlessly rehashed. In other

words, they're good for the bottom line.

The never-ending analysis for 2008, though, has already morphed into a

deafening background noise. And the press' often shallow [0] performance

last week does not bode well for the long term.

We have an industry of media political pros who have surprisingly little to

say (i.e., Clinton has more experience, but Obama represents a fresh face),

yet insist on saying (or writing) it over and over and over. Raise your hand

if you felt like you learned something truly insightful from the tidal wave

of press coverage last week about Obama, Clinton, or the upcoming Democratic

primary season.

And make no mistake, the media's flood-the-zone reaction to Obama and

Clinton announcing they were forming presidential exploratory committees was

unprecedented in American campaign journalism. Indeed, anybody who needs

further proof that the Beltway press corps has surrendered to the cult of

personality, last week's display of Clinton-Obama mania should suffice.

It's true that the press does not control the campaign calendar [0], and

that more and more states are moving up their primary dates so they'll have

more influence on the nominating process. But the press is clearly still

driving the over-excited coverage and hyping the expanded campaign season.

(CNN is already advertising its April debates from New Hampshire.) Meaning

yes, the exploratory committee declarations are coming earlier. But what has

not changed is the fact that no ballots are cast until early 2008. So why is

the press treating the Obama and Clinton announcements as being so wildly

important? (They're not even official candidates yet; that news cycle comes

later.)

It's obvious that Clinton and Obama's stars burn brighter than some previous

candidates such as Bill Bradley or Paul Tsongas. And I'll admit the

spectacle of a former first lady running for president herself is

extraordinary, as well as historic. But at this stage, Clinton's

announcement hardly passes as unexpected. In fact, it was completely

perfunctory.

And if Obama had made an audacious last-minute entry into the campaign one

year from now, reminiscent of Robert Kennedy's belated decision to join the

1968 race (he jumped in after the New Hampshire primary) then, yes, there

would be cause for the type of hyperventilating coverage that has been on

display -- the urgent tone regarding endorsements and fundraising and the

shifting political landscape. But forming an exploratory committee twelve

months before the first primary and nearly 700 days before the general

election -- that's Big News?

Apparently so. In the 36 hours surrounding Obama's move last week, "Obama"

was mentioned more than 620 times on cable and network television newscasts,

as well as National Public Radio, according to TVEyes.com. In the roughly 36

hours following Clinton's Saturday announcement, she grabbed more than 1,000

television and NPR mentions. Last week, Obama and Clinton combined to garner

nearly 3,500 on-air mentions, which averages out to more than 20 references

every hour for 168 straight hours, or an entire week. (I'm convinced MSNBC

talker Chris Matthews goes to bed at night thinking about Clinton, mumbles

her name in his sleep, and wakes up with Clinton on the brain.)

Think back to 1999 when then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush unveiled his

presidential exploratory committee with a showy presentation in Austin. The

next day The New York Times published a modest 900-word story on Page 14.

The Washington Post was a bit more generous, giving the Bush story Page 1

treatment, with a 965-word dispatch.

Note that in 1991, the press barely even registered the fact that Bill

Clinton had formed an exploratory committee. The New York Times published a

300-word wire item from the Associated Press, while the Post gave the news

just 600 words, inside on Page 4.

By comparison, last week the two papers, swept up in Clinton-Obama mania,

rewrote their rules. The New York Times played the Obama exploratory

announcement prominently above the fold on Page 1, while the Post published

no fewer than four articles, totaling 3,500 words, about the Illinois

senator's White House plans. For Clinton, the Times also gave her A1,

above-the-fold placement on Sunday, as did The Washington Post. In all, the

Post printed six Clinton-related articles that day, totaling more than 5,300

words.

Too much of a bad thing

share a beer [0] with him).

In fact, instead of engaging the public, I fear the media's nonstop droning

turns people off. There's little evidence that it's news consumer hunger

that's driving the current orgy of political pontification. (As Mystery

Pollster recently noted online [0], not even voters in Iowa, home of the

first Democratic caucus vote, appear to be engaged in the campaign yet.) I

mean, what are citizens supposed to do with this avalanche of chatter?

Basically, Obama's running, and Clinton's running, and in 12 or 13 or 14

months from now, depending on where they live, voters might be able to cast

a vote for one of them. (Or for another candidate.) How many voters, over

the next 12 moths, really need a daily update about that? The answer, of

course, is almost none. But the press, taking insider-dom to new extremes,

seems more intent on feeding its own incestuous appetites.

More importantly, the media's over-emphasis on the candidates this early in

the process distracts journalists from covering more pressing issues, while

also warping their news perspective. This past weekend provided a perfect

example of the troubling trend. On Saturday, Clinton announced she was

forming a presidential exploratory committee. That same day, 25 American

soldiers were killed in Iraq, marking the deadliest day for U.S. forces in

nearly two years. Which story was more newsworthy? For lots of major

American newspapers, the answer was easy: politics.

The Chicago Tribune, for instance, made the Clinton story Page 1 news in the

Sunday paper but not the bloody news about troops in Iraq, which was

reported inside the paper. So did The Hartford Courant, The Oakland Tribune,

Portland Oregonian, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and St.

Louis Post-Dispatch.

Meanwhile, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star

Tribune all played the Clinton story above the troop story on their front

pages. (The Washington Post published the stories side by side on its front

page.)

The other real downside to today's early saturation coverage is that

journalists, anxious to juice the narrative, are too often tempted to simply

manufacture conflicts where none exist. For instance, there's been a

constant buzz about the emerging rivalry between Clinton and Obama, despite

the fact there has not been a single cross word publicly spoken between them

or anyone directly associated with them. Still, journalists, desperate to

advance the storyline, persist. Note this head-scratching [0]

bit of minutia disguised as analysis from a December 8 Washington Post

article, headlined, "For Now, an Unofficial Rivalry; Possible Clinton-Obama

Presidential Clash Has Senate Abuzz":

In the fishbowl of the Senate, interactions between Clinton and Obama are

frequent and closely scrutinized. During a routine vote yesterday morning,

Obama and Clinton brushed past each other on the Senate floor. Obama winked

and touched Clinton on her elbow. Without pausing, she kept walking.

Meanwhile, last week, a lot of reporters simply made up [0] the story that

Clinton canceled a Capitol Hill press conference she was scheduled to give

upon the return from her fact-finding trip to Iraq because it fell on the

same day Obama made his White House announcement. The details though, were

clear: Clinton postponed her press conference the night before, prior to

Obama's announcement, because a congressional colleague of Clinton who also

made the trip to Iraq had fallen ill. Yet reporters such a Dana Milbank at

The Washington Post, pretended not to understand [0] the facts in order to

mock the Clinton campaign for "stumbling" and "getting defensive" over its

postponed press conference.

Time.com's political blog also played the same bogus [0] Clinton press

conference game: The Clinton camp was "spinning" the facts of the canceled

event even though the facts were completely accurate. (Time.com even slipped

in a snarky Whitewater reference, because it's Clinton. Get it?)

In a post last week on The New York Times' political blog, The Caucus, Anne

E. Kornbut (who this week got her first byline [0] as a staff reporter for

The Washington Post) reported, "Brushing past reporters in the Senate, Mrs.

Clinton -- conspicuously talking into her cell phone; whether there was

anyone on the other end of the line, or not, could not be confirmed." Yes,

Kornblut, based on nothing but a snide hunch, suggested Clinton was faking

[0] a phone conversation.

The Beltway press is extending the campaign into a prolonged silly season so

news consumers have to suffer through nonsense like that? It hardly seems

fair.

_______

About author A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former

senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press

Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at

eboehlert@aol.com [1]

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson