Media Muddle over Candidates

There is so much talk in the media about the media being in the pocket of Barack Obama—just look how all the anchors traipse after him in Europe. Poor John McCain is always holding the short end of the stick. On the other hand, you can read something like the Huffington Post and hear the opposite viewpoint, that the media is favoring McCain and giving Obama a bad time every chance they get, like their one-note-criticism about the Surge, which apes what was coming out of McCain’s mouth, who would also add, “ I would rather lose the election than lose the war,” as if Obama was some kind of borderline traitor. Another little trick that I heard this past week was some members of the media, especially after his big splash in Germany, were calling Obama the “presumptuous candidate” rather than the presumptive one. It’s all a matter of shadings and twisted meanings that are often considered fair game in politics.

Last week that speech he gave in front of 200,000 Germans was the lead item on the evening news. I saw two reports about it that were like night and day. First I listen to Keith Olberman’s program COUNTDOWN, comments by Keith, Howard Fineman, Richard Wolfe and Rachel Madow. They were in general agreement that Obama had wowed the Germans with one of his standard inspirational speeches. He hadn’t tried to be Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan; he just stated his case about “This is our moment.” They all saw it as a positive for his campaign, as the U.S. has to stop going it alone and to repair the damage that the Bush Administration has done in Europe and elsewhere. They were also rough on McCain, showing footage of him talking about the “extremists gathered on the Iraq-Pakistan border.” Check your map folks. There is no such border. Iran stands in the way. This is our Foreign Policy expert. They mentioned other gaffes to reinforce the idea that McCain really wasn’t presidential material. Then I switched to CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. There the emphasis was on McCain’s reaction to Obama in Europe with everyone wondering why Obama had to impress the foreigners rather than the folks back home, where the problems were. He needs to persuade us not the Germans or the French that he is presidential timber, as they used to say. They tended to see the German extravaganza as showboating, an egoistic act, and the speech was the same old line, just rhetoric. Rather they showed McCain talking to some veteran group, with everyone shaking his hand. But they also showed him in a Colorado supermarket in the aisle with one woman with cart and a grocery clerk who had just knocked a dozen glass jars off a low shelf. He looked confused, as if he wasn’t sure why he was there. Think of that picture versus the shot of Obama standing in front of 200,000 cheering people. One image can be worth a thousand words.