No, Not Everyone. Just You.

Update and NEWS FLASH, apropos of this post: Tim Russert has died.

I saw on the front page of the NYT today (before my Mom dashed off to her babysitting gig) that media organizations are under fire for sexist coverage of the campaign. Via Jeralyn at TalkLeft, it appears that MSNBC and NBC are being defensive about it:

Keith Olbermann, the host of “Countdown” on MSNBC, said that while there were “individual, sexist, mistakes,” there was no overall sexism. Any suggestion that MSNBC “was somehow out to ‘get’ Senator Clinton is false and unfair,” Mr. Olbermann wrote in an e-mail message. “We became a whipping boy.”

Well, if the whip stings...

Lost in the general negativity about sexist coverage is the notion that not all failure are equal - while I think it's poor judgment on the part of CNN to treat contributors like Donna Brazile as unbiased or neutral, much of CNN's coverage of the primary season set the bar for good reporting and sensible analysis (that was helped, in no small part, by actually knowing who was backing Clinton, and including them in discussions and interviews). And while Fox News is, well, Fox News, their umbilical cord to the right wing provided them a vantage point over the Democratic primaries of a certain sort of unique objectivity: when you're rooting for no one, it's easy to be evenhanded.

Even at the network level, it's hard to fault much of the work CBS (where Katie Couric, and her troubles, made their treatment of Clinton the least of their problems) and ABC (even though Stephanopolous seemed especially non-plussed at revisiting the Clinton experience, he did know his subjects; though his use of Brazile was also highly problematic).

But NBC and MSNBC... well, that's another level.

Given the remarkable defensiveness, it's worth pointing out that nothing at MSNBC was isolated: from Matthews to Olbermann to Scarborough to Carlson, there were multiple incidents, and near constant background buzz of disrespect and obvious bias. Whatever amount of it was personal animus - Matthews and Olbermann seemed especially incapable of suggesting otherwise - it also seemed to reflect some sort of corporate decision to court controversy by "pushing the envelope" on comments and personalities. That was probably a necessary choice, though whether it worked is debatable: MSNBC continues to run a generally dismal third in cable news ratings.

Moreover, as I meant to observe a week or two ago, this phenomenon is not new. One of the interesting pieces of fallout from the Scott McClellan book release was a discussion of whether the media did enough to question the run-up to war. Clearly they did not. But a couple of interesting points surfaced in the reporting - namely that NBC, more than other networks, pressured it's reporters to slant coverage:

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began,the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.

And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network at the time -- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.

Katie Couric spoke of pressure while interviewing Condoleeza Rice:

After the interview, Couric said she received an email from an NBC exec "forwarded without explanation" from a viewer who wrote that she had been "unnecessarily confrontational."

"I think there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations," she said in an interview with former journalist and author Marvin Kalb during "The Kalb Report" forum at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

And Ashleigh Banfield, then a rising star at MSNBC, also felt pressure:

In April of 2003, then-MSNBC star Ashleigh Banfield delivered a speech at Kansas State University and said that American news coverage of the Iraq war attracted high ratings but "wasn't journalism," because "there are horrors that were completely left out of this war." She added, echoing Couric:

The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason.

That just seems to be a trend of late, and l am worried that it may be a reflection of what the news was and how the news coverage was coming across. . . . I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I'm very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people's opinions. It was very sanitized.

Shortly thereafter, Banfield was demoted, then fired altogether, and -- as Digby put it in her great analysis of Banfield's speech -- "she's now a co-anchor on a Court TV show."

(All via Glenn Greenwald) So what links these three is almost painfully obvious: women working for NBC, pressured to alter content on the war... all of whom subsequently left.

It's easy, as I said, to make these media stories into a blanket attack on the industry... but it seems clear to me there's a problem here, and it rests with one network: NBC, parent of MSNBC. It's a problem that's likely to be less visible now through the general election - few lefties will really get excised about poor treatment of John McCain, and McCain's run is shaping up to be so disastrous that one network's pile-on will hardly make a difference... but it seems to me letting NBC off the hook - or calling them just "part of a larger problem" misses the point: the problem is them. And it has been for quite a while. Not everyone. Just them.

Comments

[greg]

Well...if we're defining "the problem" as anti-Clinton bias, then you're probably right that it's (MS)NBC that deserves the scorn. I don't have a TV, and never once watched any coverage from any of the networks. Except I go the gym nearly every day, and CNN is nearly always on.

And my god was it terrible. I simply can't stand to watch Lou Dobbs and his self-aggrandizing defender-of-the-real-America shtick. Anderson Cooper drives me nuts with his blue-steel-esque gaze at the camera (Zoolander reference); to me he just screams over-actor trying too hard to play the role of serious journalist. And all the women, save Candy Crowley and probably someone else I'm forgetting, are petite and perky and young and pretty...and not necessarily bad or wrong about anything, but all.exactly.the.same. Don't get started on Wolf Blitzer. Or that guy who draws colorful lines on maps (do you notice they're always holding notepads, as if they're about to jot something down that's Very Important, but when you get a glimpse of the pad, it's empty!)

And the topics! There's no contrived controversy they won't dedicate HOURS to. I could work out for an hour and they'd STILL be talking about the asinine "plagirism-gate" or whatev was the flav of the day THE ENTIRE TIME.

All of which is my ranty way of saying the coverage was very very poor. They try their hardest to gin up scandal whenever they can, focus exclusively on the insubstantial, and maintain an incredible sense of self-importance throughout (if I hear "best political team on television" one more time...). If CNN is really is the best, that's horrifyingly scary.

[jinbaltimore]

Excellent post. Olbermess and Matthews were definitely the worst offenders. It was odd that the repub spokespeople were actually less biased/obnoxious.