Tag: Barack Obama

More on Fournier and the AP

Some years ago I remember reading a profile of Ron Fournier, who was then fairly new as a political reporter for the Associated Press.

It’s not likely I’m going to find a link at this late date, so I’ll have to rely on my memory. What I recall was his saying he’d never been all that interested in politics, an attitude he thought had helped him break some stories. He was a hard-news reporter, not a partisan.

Well, now. I want to follow up my post of earlier today, because I think Fournier’s “analysis” of the Joe Biden pick is remarkable enough that we shouldn’t let go of it too quickly. It’s not that Fournier’s anti-Obama bias is so obvious, though it is. It’s that his take is embarrassingly dumb and shallow. A news analysis is an odd duck; neither a news story nor an opinion piece, it is supposed to make sense of the news. Fournier’s attempt fails dismally.

Steve Stein has posted some terrific links, and I recommend the Washington Monthly item he flags. What I like about that item, written by Steve Benen, is that it gets to the heart of how lazy Fournier is to suggest that Barack Obama’s choice shows a “lack of confidence” in his reformist, outsider message. As Benen notes, you could say that about any vice-presidential pick: if Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton, it would show a “lack of confidence” that he could win the women’s vote without her. You get the idea. Benen also notes that Fournier nearly took a job with the McCain campaign in 2007.

Drilling down a little further, Eric Boehlert’s excellent overview — which gathers everything from Fournier’s inappropriately supportive e-mail to Karl Rove to his supplying McCain with his favorite donuts (ooh, sprinkles!) — links out to a Politico piece that explains Fournier’s rationale for the AP’s increasingly edgy, opinionated journalism. Michael Calderone writes:

Fournier is a main engine in a high-stakes experiment at the 162-year old wire to move from its signature neutral and detached tone to an aggressive, plain-spoken style of writing that Fournier often describes as “cutting through the clutter.”

In the stories the new boss is encouraging, first-person writing and emotive language are okay.

So is scrapping the stonefaced approach to journalism that accepts politicians’ statements at face value and offers equal treatment to all sides of an argument. Instead, reporters are encouraged to throw away the weasel words and call it like they see it when they think public officials have revealed themselves as phonies or flip-floppers.

I’m not buying it. I’m no fan of traditional objectivity and its passive reliance on official statements. But we need tough, fair, neutral reporting more than ever, and it seems to me that the AP ought to be at the forefront of providing it. With regional newspapers cutting back on their national and international coverage, this should be a chance for the AP to shine.

In an e-mail to Media Nation, Stephen Burgard, director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University (i.e., my chairman), writes:

I read Fournier’s “analysis” before checking your blog today and was independently appalled. Since when is choosing somebody knowledgeable in foreign affairs and the Senate Judiciary Committee, who balances a ticket as well, a sign of lack of confidence or weakness?

The suggestion that the confident move would be to bring in somebody inexperienced who represents the “politics of change” and “hope” is ludicrous; it’s something you might expect to see in a student lefty publication, not from the AP, which is supposed to understand how presidential politics works.

I can’t help remembering that the AP’s Walter Mears wrote the book on the journalistic form “news analysis.” In addition to writing good ones, he was able to explain what they were when done right. Not straight news stories. Not opinion pieces. But somehow interpretive in a way that shed an informed reporter’s light beyond just being a stenographer of events.

Perhaps Fournier thinks he was being “intrepretive.” He wasn’t. Fournier may well be in the tank for McCain, but I would feel only slightly better if he were dishing it out equally to both sides. The fact is that Fournier’s “analysis” is a piece of pure opinion, unsophisticated and uninformed.

It’s not just that it should have been better. It’s that we depend on the AP to provide us with something fundamentally different.

Photo of Fournier by Josh Hallett and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Spinning the obvious

In an “analysis” headlined “Biden pick shows lack of confidence,” Ron Fournier of the Associated Press writes:

For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn’t beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.

That’s because, well, Obama probably can’t beat McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack.

Let me lend a hand and help Fournier with what he may be writing one week from today:

For all his self-confidence, the 72-year-old Arizona senator worried that he couldn’t beat Democrat Barack Obama without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Romney selection is the next logistical step in a McCain campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.

Any questions? Other than wondering how many brain cells Fournier fired up before putting fingers to keyboard?

David Brooks on Friday: “Biden’s the one. The only question is whether Obama was wise and self-aware enough to know that.”

Biden his time

Granted, the Olympics messed up the timing, and no one announces his running mate during the convention anymore. But why would Barack Obama tell everyone his choice is Joe Biden “in the wee hours of Saturday morning”?

If nothing else, we’ll get to see how many Sunday talk shows Biden can hit tomorrow. There are — what — five? He can do it. The man does like to talk.

The audacity of Mother Jones (II)

Jay Rosen got an answer out of Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief, David Corn, as to why the magazine is asking the question “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history?”

Corn points to a speech Obama gave earlier this year in which he conjured up visions of the American Revolution, Abolition, the Depression, World War II and other patriotic touchstones in order to drive home his campaign theme of “Yes we can.” MoJo has since added that in the form of a blog post from February unsubtly titled “Barack Obama’s Messiah Complex.”

I’m not going to reproduce the Obama speech excerpts here, because you can just follow the links. But I do want to consider Rosen’s three questions:

Which comes closest to your view?

1.) Sure enough, Obama in this except “compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history” and Mother Jones caught him at it, puncturing the Obama hype. Good for them!

2.) No, Obama does not “claim that his campaign is comparable to the great progressive movements in U.S. history.” Not even close. Mother Jones is engaging in the kind of audacious hype it claims to be opposing. Bad move.

3.) It doesn’t matter whether Obama actually said anything like that because his supporters believe his campaign is a movement of transcendent historical importance, and that’s what Mother Jones really meant, it’s just that the editors phrased it badly, attributing to the candidate claims that have been made by others about him.

Jay thinks the correct answer is #2. Strictly on a factual, non-emotional basis, I agree. But it’s more complicated than that. I think the truth is #2 plus a strong dose of #3, along with at least a slight whiff of #1.

All politicians invoke great moments in American history, as Obama did. But Obama has gone farther by explicitly drawing parallels between his candidacy and those moments. It’s understandable — the election of an African-American as president would rank as a stunning achievement for our race-benighted culture. But it’s got nothing to do with Obama personally.

The thing is, I think Obama understands that, and I think David Corn and company understand it, too. So the question becomes why journalists would compress Obama’s argument into a shallow soundbite that makes it sounds like Obama thinks of himself as a combination of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s not so much that MoJo is completely wrong; it’s that the magazine is being reductionist and stupid. Why?

By the way, I know Corn and have a lot of respect for him. We spent part of the afternoon on Election Day 2004 at a Starbucks near Copley Square, picking out John Kerry’s cabinet for him. But to the extent that he agrees with this particular editorial decision, well, I think he’s wrong.

The audacity of Mother Jones

Mother Jones magazine asks: “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history?”

Jay Rosen asks: “Has Obama compared his campaign to the great movements in progressive history (like civil rights?)”

Media Nation asks: Where is the evidence for Mother Jones’ premise? Perhaps Obama did say such a thing, but I don’t remember it. Let’s have the precise language.

Update: Welcome, Huffington Post and PressThink readers. Here’s my latest on the subject.

The media and John Edwards

For the past few weeks, I’d been sort of half-paying attention as a few political observers — especially Mickey Kaus of Slate — ripped the mainstream media for not following up the National Enquirer’s stories about John Edwards’ affair. Frankly, I couldn’t bring myself to care, and I felt pretty much the same way last October, when the Enquirer broke the story.

Did anyone seriously doubt that Edwards had been screwing around? Did it matter? (Bipartisan alert: I say that as someone who’s perfectly happy that Larry Craig decided to stick around. His only mistakes were pleading guilty to toe-tapping and sounding like a schmuck in his public statements.)

In Edwards’ case, it took a caller to Howie Carr’s show on WRKO Radio (AM 680) yesterday to snap me back to reality. Her point: If the media had ripped the bark off Edwards last fall, when he was still a semi-viable presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee today.

Good grief. She was right. While Barack Obama was winning Iowa, Clinton was coming in third, behind Edwards. Though she came back and won the New Hampshire primary the following week, she never really recovered from that devastating opening round. And until Edwards dropped out, he and Clinton split the anti-Obama vote. (I will grant you that these things change quickly. Just a few months earlier, Obama and Edwards were seen as splitting the anti-Clinton vote.)

Now, I haven’t gone back and re-examined the post-New Hampshire results, so my logic may not be impeccable. Edwards did fade very quickly, so there probably weren’t too many Clinton votes that he soaked up. But to the extent that he delayed the emergence of the Obama-versus-Clinton steel-cage match, he helped Obama enormously. And it was in those early weeks that Obama won the nomination.

So, to return to my original question: Should the media have gone after the Edwards affair last fall? I guess I’d have to say yes, for a couple of reasons.

First, Edwards’ campaign was a serious one, as these things go. He had very little chance of winning the nomination, but his chances weren’t nearly as slight as those of, say, Chris Dodd. And whether we like it or not, sex still matters in American politics. It’s not the media’s job to decide for the rest of us that it doesn’t matter. (Nor should the media overplay it, as they did, most memorably, in the Lewinsky story.)

But whether you like it or not, many Americans want to know if their would-be leaders have been faithful to their spouses, and in that respect the media failed to report important information at a time when it would have mattered.

Second, there was the peculiar nature of Edwards’ appeal. It’s only a slight exaggeration to observe that his entire public persona, other than fighting on behalf of the elderly union folks who lined up behind him at televised rallies, was based on the idea that he had a great family, and that his wife’s battle with cancer had only brought them closer together.

It wasn’t true — or, at least, it was more complicated than that — and, thus, Edwards was engaged at some basic level in consumer fraud.

I first saw Edwards while covering the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 2000 for the Boston Phoenix. One morning, he spoke to the Massachusetts delegation. I was repelled by his smarmy unctuousness, and though I should probably let him speak for himself, I think it’s fair to say that my then-fellow Phoenician Seth Gitell reacted the same way. (Update: Seth weighs in, and I was right.)

Last night I went to bed rather than watch Edwards’ interview on “Nightline.” I figured if anything noteworthy was revealed, I’d hear about it and could watch it online later. But I read the statement Edwards issued, and like many, was fascinated by its icky self-absorption. Watching CNN last night, I thought Paul Begala might actually throw up in discussing Edwards’ self-pitying tone. Unfortunately, the transcript’s not up yet.

And how about Edwards’ wanting us to know that he never loved Rielle Hunter (turning “I never had sex with that woman” on its head), and that Elizabeth’s cancer was in remission at the time, so it was, well, not OK, but not as not-OK as it would have been otherwise? But I’ve ranged far afield of my original point.

Every day the media put their thumbs on the scale not just in terms of what they choose to cover, but what they choose not to cover as well. No doubt editors and news directors came up with a lot of high-minded reasons for not going after Edwards in October. I might have even agreed with them then.

But their decision — totally contrary to the way they handed similar allegations about Gary Hart in 1987 and Bill Clinton in 1992 — may have changed the outcome of the 2008 presidential campaign. No, they couldn’t have anticipated it. But that’s just another reason why they should have covered the story instead of covering it up.

Photo (cc) by Alex de Carvalho and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

More on the so-called liberal media

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that Dana Milbank’s smear of Barack Obama in the Washington Post — a self-regarding quote that’s neither verified or presented in context — is just the latest example of how the so-called liberal media establish their bona fides by beating up on liberal politicians.