Flip-Flopper in Chief
This story from Alternet nicely summarizes both the contrast between Kerry's and Bush's images as a flip-flopper and a steadfast leader, respectively, and the truth about both, as well as exploring the roll the media had played in cementing those images.
If you've read this blog for awhile, you know my feelings about the competence of the media. When they run stories about Kerry flip-flopping or Bush being resolute I don't feel it betrays a media bias as much as a media laziness. In an interview on "The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart" a couple months back, Wolf Blitzer admitted that the media, in the run-up to the Irag war, got caught up in "group-think." There's nothing I've seen of media behavior to believe there was anything unusual about that situation, other than the stakes for the US and the world. That was the big test for the news media. They failed. They fail similar, smaller tests daily and, as the coverage of campaign 2004 has demonstrated so far, they fail more often than not.
It's apparently too hard for a journalist to look at something a candidate says and analyze it for truthfulness. It's too hard for a journalist to listen to Bush and Cheney and their ilk repeat day after day that Kerry's a flip-flopper because he "voted for the appropriations bill before he voted against it" and put what they're saying in context. It's apparently too nuanced and sophisticated an issue for most reporters to understand and pass on to the public the extra bit of information that Bush theatened to veto the bill before he signed it.
Sometimes the press comes through. After Zell Miller went alien at the RNC, several news organizations were happy to point out that Miller was critisizing Kerry for saying the same thing Bush had, that our troops in Iraq are an occupying force. But then they pat themselves on the back and smiling their smug grins, having done the right thing for once, go back to their hackish lazy ways.
It's not a liberal or conservative media bias we have to fear. It's a media that's too lazy to do more than read press releases and pass them off, without verification, as news.
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