An unhealthy symbiosis
A presidential candidate who speaks in messianic terms, and media disciples who worship him, offering both praise and gold, is not a healthy combination in a democracy. Howard Kurtz describes a politician who has become a gladiator in addition to being the messiah:
Barack Obama met with traveling reporters near Jordan’s Temple of Hercules, a gladiator standing his ground against the media hordes. But even as the likes of NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and ABC’s Jake Tapper rose to press the Democratic candidate on Tuesday, television viewers back home heard nothing but faint voices in the wind. The journalists weren’t miked; only Obama’s answers came through loud and clear.
That may have been unintentional, but it underscored the degree to which Obama has controlled the message — and, more important, the pictures — during his exhaustively chronicled trek across the Middle East and Europe. Obama meeting the troops, meeting the generals, meeting prime ministers and kings, drawing a huge crowd in Berlin yesterday — the images trump whatever journalists write and say…
“The pictures bring people into the story,” says Jerry Rafshoon, who was President Jimmy Carter’s media adviser. “In the television age, the more people who can see him in the role of commander in chief, the better it is for him.” By contrast, Rafshoon says, when John McCain was seen riding around Kennebunkport in a golf cart with former president George H.W. Bush, “you’re seeing him with his generation, the older generation. They looked like the past.”
Dorrance Smith, President Bush’s former Pentagon spokesman and a onetime ABC News producer, agreed that “the pictures have dominated. . . . In a campaign, that’s as good as gold. The pictures would have broken through whether there was a one-camera pool or every anchor in the world.” Beyond the images, most journalists and pundits have depicted the trip as an unalloyed triumph. “A slam-dunk success,” in the words of Time’s Joe Klein; “a real grand slam,” as Salon Editor Joan Walsh put it on “Hardball.”
Meanwhile, from IBD: “An analysis of federal records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 ratio over Republicans…235 journalists donated to Democrats, just 20 gave to Republicans — a margin greater than 10-to-1. An even greater disparity, 20-to-1, exists between the number of journalists who donated to Barack Obama and John McCain.”