Criticism of Campaign Press

Cole Campbell, a former editor of the St. Louis Dispatch, has written an interesting article discussing the role of political journalists in the current campaigns. Campbell uses a column by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz to make his point, that is, that the campaign coverage often gets it wrong:

The press had focused on Dean’s money and volunteers and Gephardt’s union backing, but paid no attention to factors that led to Kerry “roughly doubling Dean’s vote total,” Kurtz notes. “To put it mildly, you didn’t read it here first.”

These characterizations beg several questions. Who enthroned Dean and named him the front-runner? By what criteria can journalists claim he has been dealt a serious blow or dethroned? Who vaunted his grass-roots movement, and who characterized his position as “near-invincible”? (By what criteria of invincibility?) Who decides that New Hampshire is a critical test for Dean, but not others? Who will decide whether Dean passes it? Who pitted Dean’s organizational prowess against Kerry’s and Edward’s “message and momentum”? Who says – and exactly what does it mean to say things this way – that voters “began” to take a “more serious look” at “all the candidates” in the last two weeks? (What had they been doing in earlier weeks? Looking facetiously, or at only some candidates, or not at all?) And who has the prerogative to describe the candidacy of a former governor as an insurgency and the candidacy of a first-term senator, taking on the same political establishment, as conventional politics?

We know the answer: The campaign press corps. But the campaign press corps’ stories citing all these factors, causes, dynamics and developments never mentions the centrality of the campaign press corps in picking what counts and doesn’t count in explaining--or explaining away--political reality. The campaign press corps pretends it doesn’t exist, except to observe and explain. It pretends it is a political innocent.

To read the entire article, go here.