Not that I agreed with most of what he had to say about the financial meltdown but since my opinions don’t jibe with my libertarian newspaper chain, I’d rather not use their Web site for my soapbox.
(And by the way, his column is on our Web site for everyone to read, so I’m not sneaking an early peek at it, as some Hart defenders keep claiming).
But this week, Hart’s back to lamenting the terrible news that his secret crush, Sarah Palin, probably won’t be stepping into Cheney’s office and that Biden probably will be. Which I wouldn’t bother to disagree with except that in the course of lamenting the Obama presidency, Hart comments that “as soon as Obama is president, we might actually find out something about him. Thanks to the militant liberal media, we know more about the backgrounds of Sarah Palin and ‘Joe the Plumber’ than we know about Obama’s.”
I know this is treated as revealed wisdom by Hart and other conservatives as if it had been handed down from Mt. Sinai on a graven tablet, but it’s bunk. Obama’s history has been scoured: His real estate dealings, his political activity, his friends, his alleged friends (he met a former member of the Weather Underground–where is the tar and feathers?), campaign finances, you name it. It’s true that most of this happened during the run for the Democratic nomination, but it did happen.
I tend to take whining about this from the right as meaning one of the following:
•The speaker really does think some of the fringe right wing stories — Obama’s an Indonesian or a Kenyan and ineligible for the presidency; Obama’s an “Islamofascist” agent; Obama was involved in terrorist bombings himself back in the sixties — are true, and the mainstream media is hiding them.
•The speaker knows perfectly well that the media have gone over Obama’s life and times, but claiming otherwise might score points for the Republicans — sure, Obama looks clean and there’s no proof he did anything wrong, but that’s only because nobody’s looked.
•The speaker can’t deal with the fact that the media didn’t turn up anything that seriously hurt Obama, whereas the more they look at Palin, the worse she looks.
Which category Hart fits into, I don’t know; itcould be his reasoning for thinking Palin got unfair treatment is different from any of the above. Maybe he’s just defensive that Palin, someone he considers an adorable example of wholesome small-town American womanhood (in contrast to all those horrible feminists who live in big cities and have girl cooties!) has actually been criticized by those mean ol’ media.
What, just because she opposes abortion even for rape victims? Because as mayor she required rape victims to pay for their own rape kits (Yes, I know Hart said he doesn’t agree with her social policies, but he supports her despite them)? Because she acted unethically in the Troopergate case? Because she lied repeatedly and blatantly about her stance on the Bridge to Nowhere? Because her husband joined a political party that advocates Alaskan secession, and whose head planned to address the UN on the subject with the support of Iran? Because she ripped into Sen. Clinton for saying she’d suffered sexism, then played the same card herself?
Pfah! Just the nasty liberals in the media!
As for the idea of the “militantly liberal” media, that’s another myth. Reporters have openly acknowledged that in the 2000 race, they kept a lot of stuff McCain told them off the record—stories about dating strippers, coming home so drunk he couldn’t find the door, about McCain calling the Vietnamese “gooks”—for fear of derailing his campaign. In a piece this week in the LA Times, reporter Maeve Reston admits that when she began covering McCain “another reporter protectively warned me that it was important to be judicious with the material I used from McCain’s bus rides to keep the conversations in context.”
After McCain reversed himself on South Carolina flying the Confederate flag, reporters fell over themselves to claim this proved what a man of honor McCain was (sure, he lied to win an election, but he admitted it!). As the McCain campaign has veered increasingly into race-baiting—or the charming effort to link Obama with the Holocaust which I mentioned earlier this week—multiple columnists still insist that McCain is a Man of Honor, he’s just … lost his way a little. Bob Somerby discusses this a lot. Just the fact that I see so many reporters referring to the “straight talk express” without quotation marks says a lot.
Compare McCain’s treatment with the endless distortions used against Gore, who never said he discovered Love Canal, never claimed he invented the Internet and never said he and Tipper were the basis of Love Story (he did say that his hometown newspaper had said so, which it had—although the reporter had distorted what Love Story author Erich Segal told him). Or the TV talk shows that discussed the “Clinton death list.”
I don’t mean the media (Fox News aside) have a conservative bias: The bias that filters in is based on a lot of things besides politics.
•Personality. Some reporters have admitted they simply hated Al Gore as an overly smart know-it-all whereas they found Bush a lovable jock-type.
•The desire to assign politicians a set role in the political narrative and to view everything they do through it: Sen. Clinton is ruthless; McCain is a man of honor and a maverick; Gore is unprincipled and ambitious; Bush is a simple plain-spoken Texas farmer and man of the people; Kerry is an out of touch elitist; and so on.
•The political press’ wish to avoid anything as boring as policy and focus on fun stuff like who’s allegedly sleeping with whom, and the hidden significance of what songs candidates listen to, what movies they watch, how they dress and so on.
