Can You Be More Specific?

Boehlert at Media Matters gives a good rundown on how the linguistic trap doors work in a presidential campaign, focusing here on the special attention Hillary Clinton receives (”Everything she does is on purpose!!”), even when she says reasonable things to unreasonable questions:

Less than one second. That’s how long it took Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to answer, “Of course not,” to Steve Kroft’s question on 60 Minutes about whether she thought Sen. Barack Obama was a Muslim. You can time it yourself by watching the clip at YouTube.

Still, that didn’t stop MSNBC’s Chris Matthews from complaining on-air last week that it took Clinton “the longest time” to answer Kroft’s question.

Lots of eager, tsk-tsking pundits and reporters agreed. They said Clinton was guilty of “hemming and hawing” in response to Kroft’s peculiar, repeated insistence that she make some sort of declarative statement about her opponents religious beliefs. And then when she did, Kroft asked that she do it again. That’s when Clinton, looking befuddled by the multiple requests, added some qualifiers to her response, including “as far as I know.” What stood out in the exchange was not Clinton’s responses, but Kroft’s weird persistence in asking a question that Clinton addressed unequivocally the first time, as though he was trying to draw out something she was not saying. Even more peculiar was Kroft’s obsession with the Muslim question amid a 60 Minutes report that was about Ohio’s shrinking working class and what Clinton and Obama were going to do to try stop of the overseas flow of U.S. manufacturing jobs. (Note to Kroft and the rest of the media: Obama is not a Muslim; Clinton knows Obama is not a Muslim; Clinton does not believe Obama is a Muslim. Clinton made this very clear.)

After parsing Clinton’s answer and then conveniently setting aside key sections of it, journalists at NBC, MSNBC, The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Time, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, among others, declared her response had been wholly deficient. Worse, Clinton’s answer simply confirmed that she was running a “slimy,” “nasty” contest. It was a “galling” comment; “the sleaziest moment of the campaign.”…

They’re starting to do this to Obama as well, and they’ll lay out a million of these irritating mousetraps for whoever the Democratic nominee is. FWIW, I think the Clinton camp shouldn’t have demanded Powers resign for a really minor infringement of politesse that slipped onto the record, and I think Ferraro should have been bounced much earlier for her weird and paranoid comments. And, the incident above is just one example of the incessant b.s. that presumably makes a campaign completely overwrought about such stuff. Not an excuse, really. But this practice by supposedly credible journalists contributes directly to a sphere of implied criticisms based on hazy, nudge-nudge reports. Not only does this let people “get in on the game,” building water cooler cases against a candidate. It also helps construct events that seem to “fit the pattern”… even when there’s no evidence they fit anything but this shadow puppet guignol. Most reporters would resist the urge, but a lot of the well-paid D.C. type fall right in line, as Boehlert shows.

Reporters and news audiences definitely should pay plenty of attention to what candidates say (and/or when they sing parody tunes about bombing Iran). But we should push for the right kind of attention; for example, it should be accurate, if not balanced. And we should listen skeptically for stories that fit these pre-fab damning profiles. (Much better to carefully handcraft your own damning profile!)

Explore posts in the same categories: 2008 Election, Color Commentary, Journalistic Ethics, Kabuki, Misdirection, Phantom News, Political Discourse