Dem Coverage? Dissection of Corporate Media Bias

Diane Sawyer's interview with Howard Dean and his wife last week was a textbook case of everything that is wrong with television coverage of politics. It reduced his campaign to the banal level of mere personality and perceived missteps, replacing issues with image � it was a frame-up.

Out of the 96 questions that Sawyer asked, 90 were about personality and temperament and only six were even vaguely about issues; virtually all 96 were hostile and negative. Thirty-six were about Dean's supposedly out-of-control Iowa concession speech, his alleged bad temper and the loss of momentum of his campaign. ("So did you lose your temper at [your son's] hockey game?") The 10-second yell in his Iowa concession speech was replayed three times during the interview, along with riffs by David Letterman and Jay Leno. ("How does it feel, to be the object of all these jokes?")

Twenty questions were about Judy Dean's absence from the campaign, which appeared to fault her for failing to stand by her man while at the same time criticizing the couple's decision to be interviewed together. ("Is it because it's a troubled time and � and the juggernaut has hit some pothole?") Twenty-one questions were about their family life, which all had a decidedly negative cast. ("Religion, first of all, ever a problem? Jewish? Christian?") All the questions to Judy Dean had a shockingly sexist subtext, about her clothes and hair and whether or not she was ready for the prime-time spotlight. She was made to seem like an un-American weirdo for failing to watch her husband on TV, for failing to have cable and for receiving rhododendron plants for her birthday. ("Not exactly romantic � ")

Throughout, the questions assumed that negative stereotypes about Dean were simple truths rather than debatable opinions. "How often does he lose his temper around you?" Sawyer asked Judy Dean at one point.

Even the paltry number of supposedly issue-related questions were really about style rather than substance. Sawyer asked four tax questions � actually the last three were hectoring restatements of the initial question � focusing on whether Dean had caved in to critics by changing his call for the repeal of Bush's tax cuts to a call for tax reform. But there were no questions about whether or not it was sound policy.

There was one foreign policy question, asked twice, about Dean's supposed gaffe in saying that the U.S. was not substantially safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein. ("So you're saying it might in fact have been better, even if he was still in power today?") Yet Dean had not said that Iraq was better off under Hussein; he had only questioned whether the U.S. was safer as a result of our invasion of Iraq.

When Dean tried to move the discussion to matters of substance, Sawyer inevitably pushed it back to negative fluff. ("I just want to make sure that I come back on a couple of things � one thing, you said that � that you decided that you've got to be yourself. That you've got to return to being what you really are�. What were you that was not who you really were?")

www.latimes.com...

Seems to me, that in the Unilateral States of America, that all sound, cogent arguments by the opposition will be stifled by the complicit corporate media.
Read the above article & then look back on the Right Wing ATS members who've posted that "The Dem candidates don't have any ideas, only criticism", or some variant there of.
You can be the savant love child of Gandi & Churchill, but if your voice is effectively cut off, no one will know.

more....

Voters Interrogated by News Media over Failure to be Alarmed by Dean Speech

On Monday's Inside Politics, Judy Woodruff discussed Tuesday's primary with two New Hampshire Voters, one of them a Dean supporter named Judy Fox:

WOODRUFF: So you're sticking with Howard Dean?

FOX: I'm sticking with him.

WOODRUFF: Despite all the publicity of the last week about the speech in Iowa?

FOX: Oh, that. That didn't bother me at all.

WOODRUFF: Why not?

www.cnn.com...

I also have a theory about the Media Whoredom so rapant these days & why it's most heinous ( Ann Coulter, Woodruff ) are women:

_ THey are operating under the false assumption of to get in the old boys club, you need to be a good old boy

Amazement over a person with common sense ( realizing that a hokey yell was for the benefit of marshalling the troops & keeping them from despaire with so much of a race left ) stems from th utter disdain & disbelief that there is intelligence in America's regular folks.

Very accurate portrayal.

Because the Deans were just being themselves, they handled everything nicely.

Swayer ended up making herself look foolish because when they answered normally, she kept trying to dig up
dirt.

Very amateurish performance by Diane. Thats what she there for, evidently. Scrape up the muck and be dramatic.

I guess anyone would be a tabloid ho for that kind of money. I think she gets 10 million a year, last I heard.

....of Ho required for $10M a year!!

But, since she started out her career looking for Pulitzers & Edward R Murrow Awards, at what point ( since she's been making that kind of bank for years) does that old professionalism kick back in, regardless of the price tag pitfalls?