Barack, Darling

By John Aloysius Farrell

 My new Facebook friend John Heilemann has a good piece in the latest New York magazine about the media coverage of Barack Obama.

 An excerpt:

“Both of them have gotten an enormous amount of play,” says Marion Just, a political scientist at Wellesley who has made a systematic study of the coverage of the race. “But the coverage of Hillary has been primarily negative, while the coverage of Obama has been so positive that you have to call him, though I really hate this term, a media darling.”

Divergence in tone is one thing, double standards are another. And it’s the latter that most galls the former advisers to the other, now-departed, Democratic candidates. “Obama has been able to get away with a stunning amount of hypocrisy that would get called on her,” says one such operative. “They’ve run the nastiest, most deceptive pieces of paid media: the mailer they did lying about her health-care plan, with the Harry and Louise look-alikes. The idea that it took Hillary growling Tony Rezko’s name in a debate to get any national coverage. How he complained in Iowa about 527s and then had them supporting him like crazy in Nevada and California. And nobody says a peep about it. It’s fucking comical!”

 Heilemann tends to dismiss the tilt, with a riff about meta-narratives that is good fun. But there are real lapses of objectivity and fairness in the 2008 coverage. Clintonista arrogance is part of it. So is the conscious, or unconscious, rooting of black journalists for their guy – reminiscent of how Irish-American journalists tanked for JFK in 1960. And here’s another cause: the current financial straits of the industry. 

 Let’s take today’s Washington Post, for example. Turn to the Politics page (A10) and what do you see: three stories that are damaging to John McCain. Now glance over to page A11, where there is one inside story, and the jump from a front page piece – both favorable to Obama.

 It is not merely that Obama is at a more exciting point of his narrative arc. There are conscious decisions being made by publishers, reporters and editors that affect the coverage and reflect ongoing changes in journalism.

 Newsroom budgets are being cut. The Los Angeles Times, the Post and The New York Times all announced further reductions in force this week. Aside from affecting their own quality and performance, these buyouts and layoffs at the top tier papers provide a ready excuse for editors at smaller news organizations to appease the corporate honchos and proceed with their own personnel cuts.

 How does this affect coverage? Well, I’d wager that overworked political editors at the Post, if they had a few more stories on their budget, would have taken more care today to provide readers with more balanced coverage.

Or let’s consider a feature of presidential politics that we have not seen this year. In previous election years, the Post (and the other big papers) have assigned ace writers like David Maraniss to do multi-part biographic series on the candidates. Not this time. We are entering the second year of the campaign and I still don’t know the details of Obama’s fatherless childhood, Indonesian schooling, teenage years, community organizing in Chicago, state Senate days or record in the U.S. Senate. Our sole comprehensive source for such information is Obama’s memoir – and as a biographer I can attest that there is no more flawed and sanitized version of history than an autobiography.

It’s not just Barack. I would like to know more about the results of Hillary’s contributions to Clinton administration policy, for instance, or how John McCain got caught up in, and was changed by, the savings & loan scandal.

But the big bio and investigative pieces claim a lot of resources. They are hard work to write and edit, and who has time in a shrinking newsroom when you have a 10:30 a.m. on-line chat for the web site; a 1:30 p.m. webcast to film and a 6 p.m. interview on MSNBC on your schedule?

It’s much easier to fill half a page with a Dana Milbank column about tuches. So gloss prevails.

And the Obama campaign, which is all about style, is the beneficiary.