Reporters don’t like it when you pick on their anointed candidate. Joe Klein sums up in the Washington Post.
Instead, we are supposed to be terribly interested in the 22nd iteration of their stands on global warming (against), Iraq (against), government controlled healthcare (for), taxes (higher) and other issues that are part of the Left’s agenda.
And woe to the reporter that breaks these rules. But back to Powerline, they refer to this scenario:
Peter Werner in Commentary:
Consider this thought experiment: Assume that a conservative candidate for the GOP nomination spent two decades at a church whose senior pastor was a white supremacist who uttered ugly racial (as well as anti-American) epithets from the pulpit. Assume, too, that this minister wasn’t just the candidate’s pastor but also a close friend, the man who married the candidate and his wife, baptized his two daughters, and inspired the title of his best-selling book.
In addition, assume that this GOP candidate, in preparing for his entry into politics, attended an early organizing meeting at the home of a man who, years before, was involved in blowing up multiple abortion clinics and today was unrepentant, stating his wish that he had bombed even more clinics. And let’s say that the GOP candidate’s press spokesman described the relationship between the two men as “friendly.”
Do you think that if those moderating a debate asked the GOP candidate about these relationships for the first time, after 22 previous debates had been held, that other journalists would become apoplectic at the moderators for merely asking about the relationships? Not only would there be a near-universal consensus that those questions should be asked; there would be a moral urgency in pressing for answers. We would, I predict, be seeing an unprecedented media “feeding frenzy.”
The truth is that a close relationship with a white supremacist pastor and a friendly relationship with an abortion clinic bomber would, by themselves, torpedo a conservative candidate running for president. There is an enormous double standard at play here, one rooted in the fawning regard many journalists have for Barack Obama. They have a deep, even emotional, investment in his candidacy. And, as we are seeing, they will turn on anyone, even their colleagues, who dare raise appropriate and searching questions–the kind journalists are supposed to ask. The reaction to Stephanopoulos and Gibson is a revealing and depressing glimpse into the state of modern journalism.
Of course these people are not just the dinosaurs of the old media, they are rabid denizens of the new.
UPDATE:
JOHN F. HARRIS & JIM VANDEHEI comment on this issue in the Politico: Obama's secret weapon: the media. They assert:
The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama.
Last fall, when NBC’s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions — a mix of fair and impertinent — he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.
But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC’s performance as journalistically unsound.
The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading.
...
Moreover, those questions about Jeremiah Wright, about Obama’s association with 1960s radical William Ayers, about apparent contradictions between his past and present views on proven wedge issues like gun control, were entirely in-bounds. If anything, they were overdue for a front-runner and likely nominee.
If Obama was covered like Clinton is, one feels certain the media focus would not have been on the questions, but on a candidate performance that at times seemed tinny, impatient and uncertain.
The difference seems clear: Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.
The authors disuss four trends in reoprting; the first:
The breakdown of journalistic conventions about point of view. In an earlier era these standards — favoring austere, stoical language conveying voice-of-God authority — were designed in part to ensure that stories betrayed no hint of the writer’s real feelings.
But the convention was a pretense. There is a generally laudable move toward more conversational — and more candid — language in stories. This shift allows a respected pro like the Associated Press’s Ron Fournier to unsheathe a knife and write this sentence earlier this year about Mitt Romney: “The former Massachusetts governor pandered to voters, distorted his opponents' record and continued to show why he's the most malleable — and least credible — major presidential candidate.”
Ah yes, the media assuming the tone of the “Voice of God.” As the authors see it, this has always been a lie, now it’s an obvious lie. Now the biases are revealed for even the most innocent victim of media bias to see.
In the past, news was manufactured in ways that hid the truth of subject “A” and focused like a laser beam on problem “B.” Today, pressies get their panties in a bunch when subject “A” is revealed and happily pile into the media scrum to destroy the poor victim with problem “B.” And if there is a mistake - like the media’s declaration that the Iraqi army was defeated in Basra to take one recent example entirely at random – the subject is forgotten while corrections are made about minor misspellings or wrong answers on the puzzle page.
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