Media discrepancies emerge during primaries

by William Martin Brown Daily Herald (Brown U.)

Conventional wisdom has taken quite… by William Martin Brown Daily Herald (Brown U.)

Conventional wisdom has taken quite a drubbing during this presidential primary. John McCain has risen from the dead, Hillary Clinton has gone from inevitability to insurgency, and Rudy Giuliani’s once-vaunted appeal is now mocked or forgotten. But one unfounded notion persists in the minds of many commentators: the media’s love affair with Barack Obama.

Supposedly, America’s fourth estate has been seduced by the junior Illinois senator’s silver tongue and liberal stances, causing journalists across the country to shirk their duty by ignoring Obama’s foibles while bombarding his opponents with baseless attacks. The Clinton campaign in particular has promoted and exploited this perception: Shortly before his strategic banishment from prominent events, Bill Clinton savaged reporters for their treatment of his wife, barking “Shame on you.” But the press’s handling of two recent scandals – NAFTAgate and Pastorgate – belies the fantasy of an Obama-media alliance. The major media outlets ignored crucial facts in their coverage of both stories, to their supposed hero’s severe detriment.

The media’s most egregious elision helped sabotage Obama’s credibility in the wake of the scandal known as “NAFTAgate.” As the March 4 primaries in Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island approached, Obama and Clinton emphasized their determination to protect American jobs by renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement. This appeal was particularly strong in Ohio, which has been hit hard by industrial outsourcing. In a debate Feb. 26, they both vowed to use the threat of withdrawal from the treaty as leverage for its renegotiation.

Shortly thereafter, the Canadian media reported that there were rumors that Obama’s stance had been dishonest. This seemed to be verified by a leaked memo from the Canadian government stating that Obama’s economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, had requested a meeting with the Canadian ambassador to the United States. According to the memo, Goolsbee reassured the ambassador that Obama’s public statements about NAFTA were “more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.” The American media picked up the story, and both Clinton and McCain exploited the opportunity to scourge Obama for his supposed mendacity. Obama’s steady advance in the Ohio polls ground to a halt, and on March 4 he lost the state to Clinton by 10 points.

The Canadian media went on to refute the allegations it had previously reported: It had been Canada’s Chicago consul, in fact, who had demanded a meeting with Goolsbee. The Obama advisor, rather than describing his boss’s public position on NAFTA as a politically motivated sham, reaffirmed his hope to renegotiate portions of the treaty rather than scrap it.

There wasn’t enough coverage of this in American media. The truth surfaced too late to save Obama in the Ohio primary, but had the media paid more attention to it, Obama’s credibility would have been restored. Now he will carry the unearned stain of dishonesty through the remaining Democratic primaries and probably into the general election, in which Ohio will again be a critical battleground.

The media’s bad habits re-emerged in mid-March, when Obama was engulfed in a firestorm of criticism over the remarks of his spiritual advisor and one-time pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The catalyst was a series of prominent stories describing inflammatory phrases in Wright’s sermons, particularly “God damn America” and “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” – used soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Obama condemned the remarks, devoted a speech to containing the fallout and declared in an interview that he would not have remained a member of Wright’s church had the pastor not retired.

But the damage had been done, and the media’s myopic approach to the story was largely to blame. Journalists covering Wright’s rhetoric made little reference to the context of the offending statements, weakening Obama’s attempts to reassure voters that they were not representative of his pastor’s beliefs. Wright’s declaration that black people should sing “not God bless America, God damn America” came at the crescendo of a sermon in which he had praised the country’s progress since the days of slavery and segregation. “Governments change,” Wright repeatedly reminded his audience, implying that the country’s bad condition was not an inherent flaw, but rather the result of its current government’s mismanagement.

The context of the comment about Sept. 11 was similarly exculpatory. Preaching less than a week after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., Wright referred to them as “the American tragedy” and twice referred to them as “an unthinkable act.” The pastor declared that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” not to dismiss the atrocities as the country’s just punishment for past misdeeds abroad, but to advance the quintessentially Christian notion that “violence begets violence.”

By focusing almost exclusively on a handful of sentences, the media presented a false picture of Wright’s sentiments. They were not the pastor’s only outrageous remarks, but they were placed at the center of the sensational coverage, without the contextualization that is – or should be – standard journalistic practice.

Nor has Obama ever seemed to receive any benefit from media myopia. For example, voters were treated to meticulous coverage of his ties to indicted Chicago businessman Antoin Rezko, despite the lack of even a hint of wrongdoing on Obama’s part. American journalism has consistently erred in favor of damaging his campaign. It’s not yet clear how this happened, or why – whether it came from bias, laziness, editorial intercessions or a lack of journalistic initiative. But it should be enough to put to rest the groundless suspicion that Obama has unfairly benefited from the favor of the fourth estate.