Media Matters for America - Columns by Eric Boehlert

The media myth: Detroit's $70-an-hour autoworker

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:12:53 EST

It's been one week since New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote that at General Motors, "the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs."

The nugget was part of a column in which Sorkin argued that the government should not bail out the ailing Big Three automakers and that they instead should embrace bankruptcy.

Sorkin's point was that labor costs were out of control -- workers enjoyed "gold-plated benefits" -- and that during bankruptcy, the auto companies could address those runaway wages.

As I mentioned, it's been one week since the column appeared, which seems like plenty of time for Sorkin and the Times to correct the misleading $70-an-hour claim. But to date, there's been no clarification from the newspaper of record or from Sorkin himself.

And he isn't alone. Appearing on NPR last week, Times senior business correspondent Micheline Maynard told listeners that the "hourly wage" of Detroit's union autoworkers had been driven up "towards $80 an hour."

Somebody at the Times needs to clarify the record, because the average United Auto Workers member is not paid $80 an hour. Or even $70. Not even close. Yet (thanks to the Times?) the issue has become a central talking point in the unfolding national debate about the future of America's automotive industry.

Indeed, that $70-an-hour meme, actively promoted by the anti-union conservative media, has ricocheted around the traditional press as well as the political landscape, where it was picked up by congressional critics last week during hearings and used to argue against aiding GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

For the record, I'm not from Michigan, and I don't have friends or family members who work in the auto or auto-supply business. And honestly, I think there are compelling arguments on both sides of the question about whether to bail out the U.S. auto industry. So I'm genuinely torn on the issue. But what's obvious to me is that it's harmful to public discourse when the press, on such a central issue facing our country, fails to clearly state the facts and instead perpetuates misinformation with sloppy reporting -- reporting that seems to hold blue-collar workers to a different standard than their white-collar counterparts.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that automotive executives should return to Washington in coming weeks to "make their case, to the Congress and the American people," for a federal bailout. And as Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner for economics Paul Krugman wrote recently, "[M]aybe letting the auto companies die is the right decision, even though an auto industry collapse would be a huge blow to an already slumping economy. But it's a decision that should be taken carefully" [emphasis added].

But having the media echo conservative misinformation and bandy about urban-myth salary figures about allegedly high-on-the-hog GM workers does not constitute a careful review of the facts.

Question: Is the press just being sloppy on this issue of supposedly pampered autoworkers, or are there other elements in play? Because honestly, I've had trouble escaping the not-very-subtle elitist, get-a-load-of-this tone that has run through the media's misinformation on the topic; i.e., "These autoworkers get paid that?!"

Answer: No, they don't, so please stop reporting it. (And why has the press been so reticent to note that Big Three autoworkers recently made significant concessions to management?)

And it's funny, because I don't remember hearing much coverage in the press about AIG workers' six- and seven-figure salaries when the U.S. government announced it was bailing out the insurance giant. And I haven't seen or heard a single press reference to the annual salaries pocketed by Citigroup employees, even though the government has moved in quickly to bail the banking giant out of a hole its executives dug.

As Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) pointed out during congressional hearings last week, "There is apparently a cultural condition that's more ready to accept aid to a white-collar industry than the blue-collar industry, and that has to be confronted."

That cultural condition seems to extend to, and be embraced by, today's white-collar press corps.

Make no mistake: The $70-an-hour claim represents a classic case of conservative misinformation. It's also a very dangerous one. The falsehood about autoworkers is being spread at a crucial time, when a make-or-break public debate is taking place, a debate that could affect millions of American workers.

"Lavish contracts granted to the United Auto Workers, for instance, put GM on the hook for more than $70 an hour per worker." [New York Post]
"The United Auto Workers are keen on saving their jobs and the $70-an-hour paychecks that go with them." [National Review]
"[T]here's no reason that a UAW worker should get total compensation of $70 an hour when the average American only makes about $25 an hour in total compensation." [James Gattuso, from the conservative Heritage Foundation, appearing on MSNBC]
"Given that we're in tough economic times, it's hard for the average American to muster a lot of sympathy for workers at the Big 3 automakers when all of the companies pay out over $70 per hour in wages, pension and health care benefits." [Right Wing News]
"The bailout as proposed today is a bailout of the UAW; it's not the auto industry. A Big Three worker in Detroit makes $73 an hour if you include all the benefits." [Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, appearing on the syndicated television show Inside Washington]
"Companies at which union workers make $71 an hour in wages and benefits -- compared to just $47 an hour at Toyota's U.S. plants -- are not going to be saved by a $25 billion government check." [Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, writing at Human Events Online]
"Big Three union workers, with their gold-plated health care plans, make about $73 an hour in total compensation." [Conservative columnist Amanda Carpenter at Townhall.com]
"When you're paying $73.73 an hour to those people with salary and benefits and your competition is paying $48 to its workers, you're going to get your butt kicked in the marketplace unfortunately." [Conservative radio host Lars Larson]
"The average Detroit autoworker makes more than $100K each year." [On-screen Fox News graphic]

Let's note that any suggestion in the press that most UAW workers earn, or are paid, $70 an hour is spectacularly dishonest. Period. (As one Daily Kos diarist pointed out last week, according to the UAW website, the base pay for a worker in a UAW plant is about $28 an hour.)

What that $70 figure (or $73) actually represents is what it costs GM in total labor expenses, on an hourly basis, to manufacture autos.

Do you see that there's a big distinction? General Motors doles out $70 an hour in overall labor costs to manufacture cars. But individual employees don't get paid $70 an hour to make cars. (The discrepancy between costs and wages is explained by additional benefits, pension fees, and health-care costs GM pays out to current and retired employees.)

Simply put, GM's labor costs are not synonymous with hourly wages earned by UAW employees. Many in the press have casually used the two interchangeably. But they're not.

Felix Salmon at Portfolio did perhaps the best job explaining the misinformation at play:

The average GM assembly-line worker makes about $28 per hour in wages, and I can assure you that GM is not paying $42 an hour in health insurance and pension plan contributions. Rather, the $70 per hour figure (or $73 an hour, or whatever) is a ridiculous number obtained by adding up GM's total labor, health, and pension costs, and then dividing by the total number of hours worked. In other words, it includes all the healthcare and retirement costs of retired workers. [emphasis in original]

Indeed, according to this Associated Press report, a chunk of GM's $70-an-hour labor costs goes toward paying current retirees' pensions and health-care coverage. In other words, that's money that's not going to end up in the pocket of any autoworker when he cashes his paycheck this week. That's money GM has to set aside in order to pay off costs associated with workers already in retirement. That money has absolutely nothing to do with calculating the hourly wage of a full-time UAW employee today. None.

So, no, UAW workers don't make $70 an hour even if you factor in benefits, because a portion of those benefits are going to people who retired years ago.

Nonetheless, that formulation (wages+benefits=$70 an hour) has been widespread. That's what Sorkin did in his Times column: "The average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs."

Not only is that inaccurate, but there's also a problem in terms of perception. It's true that autoworkers don't earn annual salaries and that when calculating hourly wages, the cost of benefits paid directly to the worker can be included. But some media outlets have been so casual and sloppy in presenting the facts that news consumers are left with the false impression that GM workers pocket $70 an hour. That's not true, and it seems some in the press are doing very little to correct that misperception.

For instance, BusinessWeek also used the same convoluted language: "Older UAW members make more than $70 per hour in combined wages and benefits." Dallas Morning News columnist Cheryl Hall did it, too: "GM's average worker makes $78.21 an hour in wages and benefits."

Why does the press use that convoluted equation when calculating how much autoworkers supposedly make?

I have a hunch it's because that $70 an hour is a real eyepopper. It makes a very deep impression within the space of just a few words.

I'm sure everybody understood the $70-an-hour implication in Sorkin's column, especially since he also lamented the "gold-plated benefits" UAW workers enjoyed. (They were "off the charts," he stressed.) And since it's harder to back up a claim of gold-plated benefits by citing the actual hourly wage of UAW workers ($28), Sorkin went with the $70 figure, along with completely nebulous language about "health care and pension costs."

The takeaway from Sorkin's column was quite clear: GM is mismanaged, and its workers are wildly overpaid.

By the way, here's the right way to cover the issue: In a November 18 column, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's David Nicklaus wrote that the Big Three "need to bring their labor costs, which average $72 an hour, closer to the Honda or Toyota level of about $45." Note how Nicklaus never implied that labors costs equaled take-home wages. Why? Because they don't. (And kudos to Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein, who refuses to use the $70-an-hour figure because it's so misleading.)

How much money GM's workers make is certainly relevant when discussing the unfolding automotive crisis. But the press should stop confusing the issue, and tainting the perceptions of news consumers, by casually suggesting that $70-an-hour labor costs represent what UAW workers pocket every 60 minutes.

That's misleading and dishonest.

And that's why it's still not too late for Sorkin and the Times to correct the record.

Covering new presidents: the media's double standard

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:50:30 EST

In anticipation of the new administration, Beltway media insiders are busy laying the groundwork for how reporters and pundits will treat the new team on Pennsylvania Avenue.

"Once a president takes office ... an adversarial relationship usually flourishes, at least with beat reporters," wrote Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. And former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, discussing the press corps on Fox News, agreed: "They are inevitably going to turn on him, as all -- this happened to every administration. I don't see why we should be surprised. It is the natural turn of events."

The conventional wisdom is quite clear: The press always turns skeptical and becomes combative when new presidents come to town.

Except, of course, when the press does not.

In truth, the model being touted today by media insiders didn't apply to the previous two administrations. That model didn't apply to Bill Clinton in 1993 because the press wasn't simply skeptical about his administration, the press savaged it. And the model didn't apply to George W. Bush in 2001, because instead of turning combative toward him, the press rolled over for the Republican.

In terms of how the press has treated the last two new presidents, there's the Democratic model (i.e. overly hostile), and the Republican model (overly docile).

At the outset of the Bush presidency, when it became obvious that the press had adopted a softer standard for judging the new Republican president, author Jeffrey Toobin noted that "the high emotional temperature of the Clinton years left a lot of people, including journalists, kind of exhausted." He added, "I think it will probably take a while to sort of gin that back up again."

Over the course of eight years of covering Bush, I'm not sure the press ever recaptured the fever it displayed during the Clinton years. So it would be deeply suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn up that emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic administration.

It would also be troubling for journalism if the press responded to conservative claims today that reporters had been too soft on the Democrat during the campaign by reacting the same way journalists did when those claims were lodged during the 1992 campaign: by trashing the victorious Democrat to prove the press corps wasn't "in the tank."

That's what helped fuel the stark double standard in terms of early coverage of the past two administrations.

One quick example: On January 31, 1993, 12 days after Clinton had been sworn into office, Sam Donaldson appeared on ABC and made this jarring announcement: "Last week, we could talk about, 'Is the honeymoon over?' This week, we can talk about, 'Is the presidency over?' " (At the time, Clinton's approval rating hovered around 65 percent.)

By contrast, on February 10, 2001, three weeks after Bush had been sworn into office, The New York Times' Frank Bruni penned a gentle, honeymoon-mode review about how authentic and at ease Bush seemed with his new role. "George W. Bush is establishing a no-fuss, no-sweat, 'look-Ma-no-hands' presidency, his exertions ever measured, his outlook always mirthful," wrote Bruni. "The gilded robes of the presidency have not obscured Mr. Bush's innate goofiness -- or, for that matter, his insistent folksiness."

Bruni's piece was a classic example of what in journalism is called a "beat-sweetener." It's where a reporter assigned to a new beat ingratiates himself with key sources by writing flattering profiles. There were precious few White House beat-sweeteners published in 1993.

"Perhaps never in our nation's history -- certainly not in its recent history -- has a President so early in his term been subjected to a greater barrage of negative media coverage than Bill Clinton," wrote the Los Angeles Times' late media critic David Shaw in 1993. (The headline to Shaw's piece: "Not Even Getting a 1st Chance; Early Coverage of the President Seemed More Like An Autopsy.")

"The level of hostility in the [White House] pressroom, I think, was extraordinary," Newsweek's Eleanor Clift told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. For example, days after the Waco siege between federal forces and Branch Davidians ended in a deadly fireball in April of that year, a USA Today poll showed 93 percent of Americans did not blame Clinton for the outcome. Clift said she thought to herself, "The other 7 percent are in the White House press room."

And Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield conceded she'd never seen any administration "pronounced dead" so quickly by the press.

The conventional wisdom today is that it was a cacophony of missteps made by the new Clinton-led Democratic team that generated the bad press in 1993. That reporters and pundits simply responded to the bungled attempt at transition. What's been erased from that equation, though, is the acknowledgement that with or without the miscues, the press had already adopted an entirely new, contentious, and often disrespectful way of treating an incoming president.

What's also glossed over is the fact that eight years later, the press then radically adjusted its standards -- again -- for the new Republican president.

For lots of people, recalling Clinton's chronic battles with the press likely conjures up impeachment flashbacks featuring a cavalcade of conservative pundits chattering incessantly about the rule of law. Or maybe the Clinton battles remind them of reading mind-numbing Whitewater updates, which, even after four years of hype, never seemed as dire or spectacular as the press made them out to be.

If the past is prologue, it's important to remember two things as the new Democratic administration prepares to take up residence. First, the press in 1992 was tagged as being overly affectionate toward Clinton in the general election. By early 1993, there had been a sea change in how journalists treated the Democrat. And second, Clinton's bad press started years before impeachment and months before any kind of official scandal machinery was put in place inside the U.S. Capitol. The hostile and at times overbearing press coverage started during the transition period and before Clinton even had time to do much of anything wrong.

"Judging by today's press conference, the traditional media honeymoon seems already on the wane," ABC News' Diane Sawyer announced on January 14, 1993, one week before Clinton was inaugurated.

Yes, there were several embarrassing tactical mistakes made early on by the inexperienced new administration that sparked bad press, including the withdrawal of Zoë Baird as Clinton's nominee to be attorney general because she had employed undocumented immigrants as her nanny and driver. And Clinton created controversy when he tried to keep his campaign promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military, an initiative the administration bungled, in part, by not doing enough preparation with allies on Capitol Hill or the Pentagon before the initiative was unveiled.

Looking back, though, the so-called scandals that the press claimed were derailing Clinton's entire presidency just days into his first term seem pretty tame. (The hullabaloo over Baird's domestic help seems positively quaint in retrospect.)

At the time though, it was pure doomsday, according to the press. Here was an utterly typical dispatch from Clinton's first weeks in office, courtesy of Time [emphasis added]:

No sooner had Clinton emerged from the embarrassing miscalculation about Zoe Baird than he found himself in an even stickier political quagmire. After promising in his Inaugural Address to end an era of "deadlock and drift," Clinton was suddenly at war with the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as members of his own party in Congress. Worse yet, the spectacle of Clinton clinging so resolutely to his gay-rights pledge after breaking broader promises on taxes, the deficit and spending projects raised questions about his judgment.

Aside from the heavy-handed language, note how Time ridiculed Clinton for "clinging" to a long-forgotten campaign promise. The irony was that one of the key themes of the nasty coverage of Clinton's early presidency was that he was weak and excessively political (i.e. "Slick Willie"), that he gave in for political reasons, and that he refused to keep controversial campaign pledges. ("Clinton guaranteed himself a spate of bad press by backing off campaign promises," The Washington Post explained two weeks after his inauguration.)

But when Clinton stood up on the campaign pledge regarding gays in the military, journalists not only were not impressed, they mocked him. (Perhaps they had different ideas about which of Clinton's campaign pledges were important and which ones were not.)

"My colleagues and I, like journalistic Dr. Strangeloves, are ready to nuke Mr. Clinton at the slightest provocation," New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb conceded just one month after the Democrat became the 42nd president.

The press pile-on simply gained momentum through the weeks and months. In the spring, the Washington Post Style section featured the headlined, "Another Failed Presidency, Already? Sure, It's Early. But What's That Sound of No Hands Clapping?"

Around the same period, Time offered up this headline on its cover: "The Incredible Shrinking President." (Weeks earlier, the doomsday Time headline on newsstands around the country asked, "Anguish Over Bosnia: Will it be Clinton's Vietnam?")

By the following year, The New York Times Magazine casually announced, "In mainstream journalism ... President Clinton is routinely depicted in the most unflattering terms: a liar, a fraud, a chronically indecisive man who cannot be trusted to stand for anything -- or with anyone."

Today, the evidence suggests the over-the-top press coverage of early 1993 sprang from a conscious decision the press made to lock and load on the Democratic White House -- just as it appeared the press chose to pull back when Bush's first term played out in 2001, the way a blanket of calm suddenly descended over newsrooms that had spent the previous eight years in nonstop scandal-and-high-dudgeon mode. ("Good for Washington in giving a new president a break at the start," the hometown Washington Post cheered in the spring of 2001.)

The press not only treated Bush with loving hands, but also dialed back its White House coverage, which meant Bush did not have to battle the media's constant glare.

A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 41 percent fewer news stories were produced about Bush between January 21, 2001, and March 21, 2001, than there were produced about Clinton during the same two-month period eight years earlier. Newsweek, in particular, practically unplugged its Bush White House coverage, publishing 59 percent fewer stories about the new Bush vs. the new Clinton.

The news blackout came despite the fact that the newly elected President Bush came into office under the extraordinary circumstances of losing the popular vote and securing the office only after a divided Supreme Court ordered the vote-counting in Florida to cease.

And yes, Bush aides were quite content in 2001 with the reduced coverage of the new president. The White House's Mary Matalin told The Washington Post in April 2001 that Clinton talked too much --"[he] would just get out there and talk about anything, any time, any place" -- and that Bush would be more "efficient" in the way he made news.

What a coincidence. The White House wanted less coverage and scrutiny from the press in 2001 (when Bush often appeared unsure of himself in public settings), and the GOP White House got less coverage and scrutiny.

The double standard in how the press treated the incoming Democratic and Republican presidents remains glaringly obvious today. For instance, in 1993, journalists complained that the new Clinton communications team limited their access (by closing off portions of the White House to reporters), that aides didn't sufficiently schmooze reporters, and that the new president did not have enough formal press conferences. Also, they complained that the Clinton team was trying to "bypass" the mainstream media by embracing other outlets, like conducting waves of satellite-feed interviews with local television stations. That's why the Fourth Estate piled on the Democrats with hypercritical coverage. Because their feelings were hurt and their egos were bruised.

"They're dissing us," David Lauter, Los Angeles Times White House reporter, complained to author Tom Rosenstiel in April 1993.

"A press corps that has been avoided and ignored and treated in a way that is Nixonian is not going to cut [the president] any breaks," announced George Condon of the Copley News Service in 1993, while serving as president of the White House Correspondents Association. His point was that the Clintons had some of bad press coming to them.

Paul Richter, White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, agreed. He said the treatment of the media by a president and his staff "really does affect the coverage."

Some journalists even admitted that that was the reason the press treated some relatively minor 1993 news stories, such as the firing of seven members of the White House travel office, with such ferocity. (A ferocity that, viewed from the distance of 15 years, seems absolutely perplexing.)

The travel office is a nonpartisan department within the White House staffed by aides who help make life easier for reporters traveling with the president by arranging meals and communications. Journalists get to know the office staffers and rely on them to help make life on the road less bumpy.

In May 1993, the White House fired all seven travel staffers for gross financial mismanagement and announced the FBI had been asked to investigate.

As Shaw at the Los Angeles Times noted, when hearing about the clumsy travel-office firings, the press corps erupted in outrage. "At one briefing, they asked 169 questions about the travel office firings. Neither Bosnia nor the President's deficit-reduction package, both major news stories at the time, received a fraction of that attention that day" [emphasis added].

In the days following the firings, the travel-office story (aka Travelgate) landed on Page One of The Washington Post six times, and four times on A1 of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. The press pitched the story as a blockbuster. In less than three weeks, the Post published nearly 20 news stories, editorials, and commentaries on the subject, even though its White House correspondents eventually conceded the firings were "relatively trivial."

Newsweek summed up the media phenomenon at play with its Travelgate headline: "Don't Mess With the Media: The White House Press Corps Gets Its Revenge."

Weeks later, when the media hyped the phony story that Clinton had held up traffic at Los Angeles International Airport while getting a $200 haircut as Air Force One idled on the tarmac, they enjoyed another round of payback. Suggesting the story revealed all sorts of deep character flaws embedded in Clinton (namely that he was a phony and a hypocrite), the press treated the haircut as an even bigger deal than Travelgate.

The so-called scandal was mentioned 50 times by The Washington Post alone, including nine times in front-page stories.

Six weeks later, though, when Newsday revealed that Federal Aviation Administration records showed no planes had been delayed while Clinton got a trim, virtually every news organization that initially hyped the story either downplayed (the Los Angeles Times) or completely ignored (The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC) the correction.

The Post was so unresponsive to the facts that the paper's ombudsman had to devote an entire column to the matter, slapping reporters' hands for doing the absolute minimum to clear up any confusion about nonexistent flight delays caused by Clinton.

And why the pile-on? Simple: The press was still angry with how their pals in the travel office had been treated. "There was a clear sense of retribution" in the media's haircut coverage, Newsweek's Mark Miller said at the time, because the media were "pissed off."

Indeed, the resentment was growing, "whether it was conscious or subconscious," said John King, then working as White House correspondent for The Associated Press. "[S]o when people had a legitimate reason to kick [Clinton] as a buffoon, they went overboard."

Try to recall, however, a single instance in early 2001 when the press went "overboard" and kicked Bush as a "buffoon" on the front pages for days on end regarding an essentially trivial process story. Cautious and respectful, the press did no such thing.

"The truth is, this new president [Bush] has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton," The Washington Post's John Harris wrote in May 2001.

Harris continued:

Try to recall this major news story during Clinton's first 100 days: Under pressure from Western senators, the president capitulated on a minor part of his 1993 budget deal, grazing fees on ranchers using federal lands. A barrage of coverage had an unmistakable subtext: Clinton was weak and excessively political and caved to special interests. Bush has made numerous similar concessions on items far more central to the agenda he campaigned on, such as deemphasizing vouchers in his education plan and conceding that his tax cut will be some $350 billion smaller than he proposed. For the most part these repositionings are being cast as shrewd rather than servile.

But if the press went easy on Bush in early 2001, if it looked the other way when he flip-flopped on campaign promises, that must have been thanks to the way the White House pampered reporters, right? Because journalists were quite open in 1993 about being offended by the White House's treatment and how being slighted, or "dissed," translated into tougher coverage. Recall that the press was angry about the way Democratic aides were uncommunicative and how few formal press conferences Clinton had held, and the way the Democrats were trying to go around the mainstream media.

In truth, of course, if the Clinton team was guilty of slighting the press in 1993, the Bush team absolutely humiliated it. The Bush White House openly advertised its disdain for the press (former chief of staff Andrew Card famously dismissed the press as just another D.C. special interest group desperately seeking access), aides quickly formed habits of not returning reporters' calls, and Bush immediately canceled formal press briefings with reporters. And even the informal ones he held were rare in the first term. In fact, Bush held just 17 press conferences compared with Clinton's 44. (Despite the media's early grumbling, Clinton actually set a new mark for the most press conferences by any first-term president in the modern era.)

Over time, it became clear to the entire country that the Bush White House did not respect the press, that it was dissing the press corps. The way the White House for years waved into press briefings a former $200-an-hour male escort with no journalism background and no serious press affiliation; the way the administration churned out misleading video news releases that crossed the legal line into "covert propaganda"; and the way the administration audaciously paid off pundits like Armstrong Williams to secretly hype White House initiatives.

The media, though, didn't punish the Republican president with bad press. Contrary to the edicts laid down in the 1990s, the early Bush coverage was not affected by how the president and his staff slighted and controlled the press. Instead, the press sheepishly fell in line, nervous about having its already limited access even further restricted.

The kowtowing was at times startling to watch. As Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Alterman noted in 2003's What Liberal Media?:

[T]he Bush team plays a kind of hardball that the Clintonians were never able to master. When Houston Chronicle reporter Bennett Roth asked press spokesman Ari Fleischer about underage drinking by the president's daughters, Fleischer informed him, Don Corleone-style, that his question had been "noted in the building." The implication was clear to all: More such unfriendly questions and Roth could be cut off, unable to do his job, and useless to his employers. The outcries of solidarity from Roth's colleagues in the press corps in the face of this public threat would not have disturbed the sleep of a napping newborn.

There were other dynamics at play, as well. For instance, as the first Clinton term unfolded, there were open discussions among journalists about how they were anxious not to be tagged as being "in the tank" for Clinton. How they didn't want to be called out by The New Republic's running "Clinton Suck-Up Watch," which mocked journalists who the magazine saw as overly effusive in their praise of the new president. It was that professional anxiousness (i.e. that peer pressure) that led some to view the new Democratic administration through an unprecedented, hypercritical lens.

It was also a phenomenon fueled by right-wing critics such as Rush Limbaugh who accused the press of having a liberal bias. Naturally, one way for the media to disprove that theory was to be especially hard on the new Democratic administration.

"If you dared say anything complimentary [about Clinton] ... you were looked at like some sort of pathetic fool who was obviously in the tank," said Newsweek's Miller during Clinton's first year in office.

At the time, observers suggested that get-tough approach toward Clinton simply reflected journalism's DNA. Brit Hume, then a White House correspondent for ABC News, insisted, "We live in a time when the worst thing that can be said about a journalist in Washington is that he or she is not 'tough.' "

In 2001, however, very few journalists appeared concerned about being "in the tank" for Bush. In fact, the tank was quite crowded.

It turns out, that urge among Beltway journalists to bend over backward for incoming Republican administrations goes back many years. Former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee explained the phenomenon to Mark Hertsgaard in his book about the press, On Bended Knee:

Stressing that it was "all totally subconscious," Bradlee explained that when Ronald Reagan came to Washington in 1980, journalists at the Post sensed that "here comes a really true conservative. ... And we are known -- though I don't think justifiably -- as the great liberals. So, [we thought] we've got to really behave ourselves here. We've got to not be arrogant, make every effort to be informed, be mannerly, be fair. And we did this. I suspect in the process that this paper and probably a good deal of the press gave Reagan not a free ride but they didn't use the same standards on him that they used on Carter and on Nixon."

Just like with Reagan, the D.C. press corps went out of its way to behave itself with Bush, to be "fair" to the new conservative president.

Looking ahead, that desire among journalists to be tough on Democrats in 2009 for fear of being tagged liberal or "in the tank" could certainly come into play when Obama is inaugurated. Because just as the press was derided by Republicans for going too easy on the Democratic baby boomer candidate in 1992 ("Liberal-Media Lynch Mob" buttons and T-shirts were seen at the GOP convention that year), reporters and pundits have been under constant attack in 2008 for going too soft on the Democratic baby boomer candidate.

So, in order to "prove" their independence, will journalists unleash an assault on the new Democratic White House the way they did in 1993?

And will the press pick seemingly random beefs to make its case against the Democratic president, the way it lashed out at Clinton for being overly interested and engrossed in the issues? And the way it said his transition team was too deliberative and close-mouthed when selecting the most senior members of his new administration? Believe it or not, in 1993, those were deemed to be serious strikes against Clinton.

In terms of the latter, restless reporters resented how, during the transition period in late 1992, Democrats didn't dole out enough information about key appointments. "The transition ruined any good feeling that there might have been," Jeffrey Birnbaum, then a Wall Street Journal reporter, said in 1993. "The dark days of Little Rock after the election, I think, are what soured the press relations with the Clintons."

The National Journal concurred in a report that year:

The amity suffered, however, as the campaign continued -- as the crowd of reporters grew and Clinton's accessibility dwindled. It deteriorated more during the transition. Reporters ensconced in Little Rock, Ark., and in pursuit of a story each day focused on Clinton's leisurely pace in making appointments and on the campaign promises he'd forsaken. By Clinton's last press conference before moving north toward his new home, the tone of the questioning had grown nasty.

Note that when Clinton's team didn't leak enough transition-team information, the press got mad and said that's when the relationship began to sour. But eight years later, when the Bush team didn't leak transition-team information in late 2000, the press praised the new White House for its discipline and message control, an obvious double standard.

Meanwhile, one of the deepest ironies of examining the hostile/docile press models for the two previously inaugurated presidents is that one of the personal traits that the press relentlessly mocked in Clinton during his first months in office was his high intellectual metabolism, how he wanted to debate every subject and engage around the clock and hear all kinds of opinions about the day's most important topics. The press saw that as a very troubling sign because sometimes it forced Clinton to delay his final decisions.

"This has led to a perception of weakness and indecisiveness," NBC's Andrea Mitchell announced at the time. (Bush's lack of intellectual curiosity eight years later did not seem to worry the press.)

From the media's perspective, Clinton was too engaged in the pressing topics of the day.

Let's hope the press doesn't foolishly hold that against the next hands-on, issues-oriented president.

Joe Biden and the press: A case study in the absurd

Wed, 5 Nov 2008 10:02:30 EST

Authenticity and access, that's what the campaign press corps craves.

Election scribes claim they long for candidates who venture off-script and are confident enough to reveal themselves on the campaign trail, to say what they really think instead of hiding behind consultant-approved sound bites. (The press, we're told, hates phonies.)

And, of course, the press prizes access to candidates in hopes of uncovering that authenticity, in hopes of tapping the candidate's true personality. The two -- authenticity and access -- are the cornerstones of the press' campaign pursuit.

So when Sen. Joe Biden was tapped as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, it should have been a press dream, right? Biden immediately swung open his doors to the press. And as he's done for years, he showed no hesitation in flashing signs of a caution-be-damned approach on the campaign trail. Forever comfortable in his own skin and representing something of a throwback to the era of garrulous Irish-Catholic pols who loved the art of conversation, Biden seemed to revel in his off-the-cuffs moments with voters and reporters.

And yes, sometimes that meant Biden became tongue-tied and made gaffes and had to walk back comments. But for reporters, Biden's approach sure seemed better than covering the type of play-it-safe candidates they regularly complain about. (I'm picturing Mitt Romney ... )

If anything, grateful reporters should have rewarded Biden's wide-open style (not to mention his generous access), right?

Wrong. Throughout the fall campaign, the press relentlessly painted Biden as a buffoon and a goof. Rather than reward Biden for being open and honest with voters, the press punished him for weeks on end.

The irony was thick. The media loved pushing the Biden-says-nutty-things narrative. Yet the press whines incessantly about how scripted candidates are and that their interaction with voters out on the trail is phony and contrived. They complain about how the candidates aren't entertaining enough, as if that's their job.

Obama "can be sort of a bore" was a typical, he's-not-amusing-us complaint from a Los Angeles Times reporter. "He's [campaigned] with dogged professionalism, but with little show of spontaneity."

But when Biden came along and communicated spontaneously -- authentically -- on the campaign trail and routinely ventured off-script (and yes, said some unexpected and unintentionally humorous things), what did the press do?

The press mocked the candidate for not being scripted enough.

The press wrote story after story after story after story critiquing Biden for being off-message and not being scripted enough. For being too authentic and spontaneous. In short, for being a goof. It was an extraordinarily absurd and shallow press phenomenon to watch unfold.

It's true that years from now, nobody's going to care, or likely even remember, what type of press coverage Biden garnered during the 2008 campaign. And in real time, it doesn't appear to have tilted the needle of the larger White House contest. (Meaning voters couldn't have cared less about Biden's so-called gaffes, especially not after he acquitted himself so well in his prime-time debate performance.)

But as the marathon campaign season winds down, it's worth noting how the treatment of Biden simply accentuated the Beltway press' glaring Achilles heel: its insatiable appetite for trivia and insistence on putting personality and style ahead of substance. For that, Biden became a case study in the absurd.

Keep in mind that in comparison with the other candidates, Biden received very little coverage. (The amount was positively minuscule compared with the media circus that surrounded GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin.) Yet what little coverage Biden generated seemed at times to be devoted exclusively to the trivial pursuit of his so-called gaffes.

In other words, the gaffe coverage didn't represent some of the Biden coverage. It was the Biden coverage.

As for what Biden was actually saying out on the campaign trail about the country's future and the Democratic agenda, journalists didn't show much interest in that. They wanted to tell only one Joe Biden story: He's a gaffe machine!!

Indeed, the Biden coverage often had nothing to do with substance and almost everything to do with style. Doesn't that perfectly capture the determined unseriousness of today's feed-the-beast campaign journalism?

Meanwhile, you haven't heard much whining from the left, but if you wanted to select the candidate who was unfairly used as the media's punching bag during the general election season, it was clearly Joe Biden.

According to a media survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, "Biden's coverage was among the most negative of any candidate studied, more so than Palin's and close to [Sen. John] McCain's. Excluding the week of the vice presidential debate, 48% of Biden stories carried a clear negative tone. Another 35% were neutral or mixed. Just 17% were positive."

That is amazing. McCain's negative coverage was largely tied to the fact that he was at the top of a ticket that went from dead even in the polls six weeks ago to trailing by double digits on the eve of the election. It makes sense that the coverage surrounding McCain's campaign tended to be negative.

But Biden? His side sprinted into an autumn lead. The only thing that explained the nasty tone of his coverage was that reporters and pundits chose to make it overwhelmingly negative; they chose to push the trivial "gaffe machine" line.

I admit I'm cherry-picking below, but I still think it's instructive to look at some of the phrases I came across while scanning the larger Biden profiles recently produced in outlets such as the Politico, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate.com, Time.com, and Newsweek. Snide doesn't begin to explain the tone the press used on punching-bag Biden:

"Biden Gaffe-o-meter"

"Joe-pocalypse"

"cringe-inducing gaffe"

"hopelessly off-message"

"a human verbal wrecking crew"

"legendary Biden verbal hiccups"

"the dotty uncle"

"uncontrollable verbosity"

Did Biden make mistakes on the campaign trail and say things he shouldn't have, or wishes he hadn't? He sure did. For instance, claiming that FDR, when he was president, appeared on television after the stock market crashed in order to soothe fears was not a prudent thing for Biden to say because FDR wasn't president in 1929, and television hadn't been invented at the time.

It probably wasn't politically astute, in terms of ticket unity, for Biden to label as "terrible" an Obama campaign ad that attacked McCain.

And the most serious misstep likely came when Biden stressed privately to donors that an Obama team would be tested by an international crisis in the first months of his administration.

But if you tallied up all the so-called gaffes, did they stand out as somehow historic in nature compared with previous campaigns? Hardly. And did Biden unfurl so many outrageous utterances that he hurt his ticket's chances for victory? Not even close.

Indeed, most of the Biden miscues that the press spent so much time cataloging were comically inconsequential, especially considering the countless hours that modern candidates spend campaigning in front of a press corps that records every utterance.

Nonetheless, the predictable Biden-gaffe stories became almost indistinguishable amongst the avalanche. So let's focus on one in particular to help get a sense of the type of leaky journalism that went into producing the assembly line of prefabricated Biden-gaffe articles.

A Boston Globe article last month was headlined "Biden gaffes leave Democrats with mixed emotions." The "mixed emotions" in the headline were emphasized up high in the article when the Globe reported that "as Biden prepares to debate Sarah Palin tomorrow, some Democrats are worried."

The Globe was pretty clear: Because of his propensity for gaffes, Democrats were "worried" about Biden and had "mixed emotions" about his candidacy. Except the Globe never quoted anybody in the article who expressed any mixed emotions about Biden or professed to be worried about his campaign performance.

Instead, every Democratic voter quoted in the Globe article expressed faith in Biden and admiration for him. When asked about his gaffe reputation (courtesy of the press), they responded this way:

"He's authentic. ... I'm sick of people being perfectly polished so you're not even seeing the real person. If he says things that aren't exactly a perfect fit with what the campaign wants him to say, that's OK."
"You know what? ... I don't want Obama and Biden to completely think alike -- if they both think alike, they're going to miss something."
"He's warm. ... When he's talking, he throws a warm feeling out to you. He wants you to listen to what he's saying because he really, really believes it."

So tell me again, who was concerned about Biden's gaffes? Because it sure seemed like reporters emphasized that narrative because they liked it (i.e. it's trivial and easy to report), not because it reflected even the faintest concern among voters.

Meanwhile, there was another notable passage from that Globe article. It was used to highlight how Biden, aside from making gaffes, sometimes became emotional on the campaign trail:

In a school gym in Greensburg, Penn., about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh, the crowd had to wait for Biden to steady his voice as he told the crowd about how Steelers founder Art Rooney, whose son Dan introduced Biden at the event, had surprised Biden's sons when they were little boys in the hospital recovering from the accident that killed their mother and sister.

Biden said he returned to his sons' room after a brief outing to find them a Christmas tree and discovered them in their beds, clutching footballs and looking "lighted up like a Christmas tree."

"They said, 'Daddy, Rocky Bleier gave it to us,' " Biden said, his voice petering out. For a very long moment, he wiped away tears. The crowd cheered, as if to comfort him, as he began to explain Art Rooney had done it without fanfare, and his voice broke again.

"I really apologize, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have tried to do this," he said. "But anyway, it's a helluva family, it's a helluva family."

Biden tried to publicly acknowledge a distant gesture of kindness from the darkest period of his life, he stumbled emotionally ("I shouldn't have tried to do this"), and then was cheered on by the empathetic crowd as he regained his composure.

It may have been one of the most human, moving snapshots from the entire campaign. Yet it was published in an article that painted Biden as a gaffe-prone goof.

Honestly, I'm glad this campaign season is over.

Nothing funny about Star Tribune's treatment of Franken

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 16:26:41 EST

The Minneapolis Star Tribune closed the barn door a little last week.

On Thursday, the newspaper's editor Nancy Barnes distributed a newsroom memo announcing that the paper's columnists should refrain from political commentary until November 5. She thought it was best if the paper's cadre of opinion makers "refrain[ed] from partisan political commentary in their columns ... at least until after the election." And that columnists would "'stand down' on the kind of column that's an overtly partisan take."

I always thought columnists were paid to express their opinions and to share with readers unvarnished insights on the issues of the day, electoral politics being just about at the top of that list. But if that's how the editor of the Strib (as it is known locally) wanted to handle the home stretch, to go ultra-civil, than that's certainly her right.

What raised eyebrows in the land of Minnesota Nice was that Barnes' memo landed on desks (or in inboxes) the day after newspaper columnist Katherine Kersten uncorked a sidewinder that tagged Al Franken, running for the U.S. Senate in the state, as being anti-Christian, and specifically anti-Catholic.

Cherry-picking from his three-decade career as a comedy writer and satirist, Kersten highlighted a handful of cracks and claimed he was unfit for the Senate because he was a "slanderer of Christianity." ("Vulgar mockery of Christians: Is this what we want in a U.S. senator?" read the headline.)

For instance, Kersten was deeply offended by a skit idea for Saturday Night Live, which never aired, in which Franken suggested a series of dogs, played by cast members, confessing to a priest. (I'm Catholic, and just the premise of that skit made me laugh.)

In another book, Franken described greeting a New York audience with the words, "Isn't Cardinal O'Connor an asshole?" (Trust me, in New York in the 1990s, that was not as provocative a statement as it seems today; O'Connor was an extraordinarily political and, at times, divisive figure.)

Then, in a deceptive bit of wordcraft, Kersten wrote, "In today's surreal political climate, a guy who lobs insults like these has a shot at one the highest political offices in the land."

Note the verb tense: "lobs," as in the present tense. As in, Franken's still in the comedy business and looking for punch lines at the expense of Christians, and especially Catholics. (Franken's daughter quickly reminded readers in a Star Tribune online forum that her father had been married to a Catholic for 33 years.)

In a state where just 0.9 percent of the population is Jewish (like Franken), the implications of Kersten's column -- that Christian slanderer Franken might not be able to represent Minnesota's citizens -- was likely not lost on many readers. It was a loaded and wildly unfair accusation to make.

And yet, it was only after that vicious attack had been unfurled in the Star Tribune -- and unfurled during the closing weeks of an extremely tight senatorial race -- that the newspaper's editor decided it was time to muzzle any further campaign commentary from the paper's columnists.

Adding to the irony (or the double standard; take your pick) was the fact that Please, people, no partisanship memo was distributed the very same day the Star Tribune printed a front-page article about GOP operative Jeff Larson, who found himself at the center of the Sarah Palin shopping spree scandal. (It was Larson's credit card that got burned up by Neiman Marcus to the tune of $75,000, courtesy of the Palin camp.)

Larson just happens to be one of the closest and most-connected Minnesota political allies of Franken's Republican opponent, Sen. Norm Coleman. But rather than present the story as an embarrassment to Coleman, the Strib's article about Larson was a valentine, complete with "Clark Kent" in the headline.

As the local blog MNpublius noted:

It is an unbelievable puff piece. Here's some excerpts: "smart Clark Kent," "Superman," "low-profile guru," "entrepreneur," "just the guy who arranges the phone calls," "rising star," "visionary," "nothing mysterious about him," "practices his Beltway-centered trade far outside the Beltway," "disciple of Ronald Reagan," "shoots straight," "honest," and "keeps his nose clean."

The story included only friendly quotes from Republicans, even though the operative has been tied to sleazy campaign practices in the past, including misleading robo-calls.

From the Strib:

He denies any involvement with the nationwide spate of "robo-calls" trashing Obama, although he acknowledges that FLS Connect is behind the live-operator calls Minnesota residents have received in the past week on behalf of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Larson denied any involvement in the robo-calls despite the fact he owns the company that been placing the robo-calls?

The role of the dailies

Even with their dwindling circulation, big-city newspapers can still exert tremendous influence during local election season, especially in a state like Minnesota that has just a handful of major newspapers. But are they being fair?

Blogger Matt Stoller recently made a compelling case that The Seattle Times had its thumb on the scale while covering the very close race between netroots candidate Darcy Burner and an established Republican Dave Reichert.

The same may be happening in Minnesota.

Like lots of major dailies, the Strib has been buffeted in recent years by staff cutbacks and accusations of a liberal bias. It seems that the effects of both are on display in the Franken/Coleman campaign.

Newsroom cutbacks make it more difficult to provide smart, in-depth election coverage. Perhaps more telling at the Strib, though, has been the long-running war conservatives have waged against the paper, led by bloggers such as Ed Morrissey, Hugh Hewitt, and those at Power Line.

Their relentless cries of liberal media bias appear to have paid off. As one Strib veteran put it last year:

The right-wing blog voices that were bashing the paper a couple of years ago, Hugh Hewitt and the rest, have gotten pretty much everything they wanted. They wanted to get rid of people like [editorial board members] Jim Boyd and Susan Albright and their editorial policy, and they've succeeded at that. Now there won't be editorials about the war and global warming; they'll write about local issues like zoning conflicts in Coon Rapids instead. They wanted the paper to hire a conservative columnist, and they got that. From here on out, it looks like the Strib becomes the conservative, suburbs-oriented paper.

Indeed, "The [editorial] page has shucked its rep as a lefty lightning rod," wrote David Brauer, a Strib-watcher at MinnPost.com. A recent Star Tribune editorial opposing the pro-labor Employee Free Choice Act signaled the sea change at the newspaper.

So did the paper's support for offshore drilling. That raised even more eyebrows because the Strib's parent, Avista Capital Partners, is heavily invested in offshore drilling, although the cheerleading drill-baby-drill editorial did not disclose that fact.

Also note that the newspaper's editorial page has not condemned the remarks of local Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, who recently went on MSNBC and claimed she was concerned about Barack Obama's "anti-American views." The comments erupted into a campaign-changing controversy, with Bachmann's challenger banking nearly $1 million in donations that flooded into his coffers after Bachmann's outburst. The Strib's editorial page, though, has remained mum.

In fact, it has moved so far to the right that the debate online among Minnesota pol-watchers was whether the paper would endorse Coleman or independent candidate Dean Barkley. Franken, the conventional wisdom went, had little chance of landing the Trib nod. (And they were right; Coleman won the newspaper's endorsement.)

Unfortunately, that tilt seems to be spilling over into the Star Tribune's news coverage. There was the way the newspaper buried Hillary Clinton's recent visit on behalf of Franken on page B4 even though her rally appearance garnered huge local television coverage. The way it included a disparaging quote from Coleman's spokesperson in its article about Clinton's visit, yet when Rudy Giuliani recently came to town to rally support for Coleman, the Franken campaign was not quoted in that article.

And there was the way the daily recently published an anti-Franken letter to the editor that claimed he was not "good for the country" or good for Christians, and the letter writer lived in Tennessee. (Talk about casting a wide net from Minneapolis.)

The paper has also looked away from Coleman's woes. Over the summer, when it became known Coleman was renting an apartment in Washington, D.C. from Jeff Larson (the same guy from the Palin shopping spree story) and that Coleman's rent appeared to be well below market value, the Strib ran a front-page story about the apartment but never mentioned Larson's name or addressed the question of whether the rent represented a sweetheart deal. (Readers had to go to page B7 for a separate article that day to read those salient details.)

At the time, there were also questions about whether Coleman had paid his utility bills for the apartment or whether they had been comped by Larson. A Coleman campaign spokesman told reporters in August he would try to produce one of the bills to curious reporters who wanted to know if the bills were in the name of Larson or even his company. But three months later, no utility bill has been produced, and the Strib appears to have stopped asking.

Meanwhile, the paper pretty much ignored Coleman's embarrassing Suitgate when it popped up earlier this month. The story erupted when Harper's Ken Silverstein claimed that wealthy Coleman donor Nasser Kazeminy had, over the years, bought expensive suits for the politician at Neiman Marcus. (Again with the Neiman Marcus?) The campaign refused to respond to the report, and the story peaked when Coleman's spokesman appeared at a press conference and 12 times in three minutes refused to answer directly whether Kazeminy had ever purchased expensive suits for Coleman. The Washington Post quickly named the cringe-inducing back-and-forth with reporters "perhaps, the most awkward press conference in the history of politics."

Did the story border on the trivial? Sure. Was it the kind of story that can change a campaign? Absolutely. Polls since Suitgate broke have shown momentum moving in Franken's direction.

In fact, it quickly became a national story online and on cable TV, and one of the Strib's reporters was invited onto MSNBC to discuss the details and the campaign implications. The irony was the reporter had only mentioned the kerfuffle in two paragraphs at the very bottom on a campaign update. The Strib didn't really care about Suitgate.

To this day, those two paragraphs, 53 words in total, represents the Star Tribune's entire print news team coverage of that story -- an embarrassing tale that could cost Coleman his Senate seat.

Drudge unplugged: How his campaign influence has collapsed

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:52:58 EST

I'm not saying that given the choice I wouldn't pick a robust economy and a worry-free global outlook. But circumstances being what they are, I have to say that as the White House campaign hits its final stride under the ominous shadow of the Wall Street meltdown and the deep recession that's hurtling this way, perhaps the only silver lining -- the one unexpected pleasure -- has been watching the Drudge Report be completely neutered by current events.

Matt Drudge is still doing his loyal best to boost the chances of the GOP down the homestretch in the form of a blizzard of anti-Obama and pro-McCain links on his site. (Last week, it was the half-baked McCain "comeback" that Drudge hyped relentlessly.)

And there's no question that Drudge's Web traffic remains strong and continues to grow, thanks to a burgeoning international audience. But in terms of setting the ground rules -- in terms of setting the campaign agenda -- Drudge has been AWOL since mid-September when the credit crisis erupted.

His current spectator status mirrors that of the low-flying right-wing bloggers. Just as the bloggers were hailed for their (pseudo) detective work in undermining CBS' Dan Rather in 2004, Drudge was credited for the way he used his widely read platform to push the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story into the mainstream press, which helped derail John Kerry's campaign.

Four years ago, Drudge and the right-wing bloggers were at the peak of their political power. Today, they're pretty much watching the election pass them by, reduced to the role of frustrated sideline hecklers.

But that's sure not the narrative the press enjoys pushing about Drudge. In The Way to Win, the 2006 conventional wisdom-affirming book about campaigning, Mark Halperin and John Harris were wildly impressed by Drudge's acumen and his nearly limitless media power. The authors devoted an entire chapter to Drudge, toasting his "visionary" "insights" and anointing him "the Walter Cronkite of his era."

"Matt Drudge rules our world," they wrote. "With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts."

And looking ahead to 2008, the duo warned, "No Democratic politician will survive in the 2008 presidential campaign without understanding the singular power of Drudge, and crafting a strategy to defend against this power." (That wasn't the only thing Halperin and Harris got wrong about 2008.*)

That adoration has remained constant among mainstream journalists, who praise Drudge's godlike power and prestige, and then benefit from the high-traffic links he rewards them with.

"What nobody who follows the daily cut and thrust of American politics questions is Drudge's continuing power to drive the stories and shape the narratives that define presidential politics," Politico announced this year. [Emphasis added.]

Not to be out-Drudged, washingtonpost.com's Chris Cillizza recently labeled him the "single most influential source for how the presidential campaign is covered in the country."

Well, I'm here to call bullshit.

And no, this isn't just a wishful, I-don't-like-Drudge-so-I'm-going-to-claim-he's-irrelevant column.

This is fact.

Because it's obvious that since Wall Street's meltdown commenced five weeks ago, and since America's economic crisis became a tsunami of a news story that's not only dominated the media landscape, but also irrevocably altered the course of the campaign, the Drudge Report has become largely irrelevant in terms of the setting the news agenda for the White House run.

That's because a story like the unfolding credit crisis -- sober and complicated -- knocks Drudge completely out of his element of frivolous, partisan gotcha links.

Think about it. Since Monday, September 15, when word of emergency government intervention to save the economy began to spread, the presidential race, according to all the available data, has gone through a dramatic fourth-quarter shift, with Barack Obama opening up a comfortable lead. We haven't seen this kind of wholesale shift in voter sentiment this late in a White House campaign since 1980.

The race is unrecognizable in terms of where the players are situated now and where they were five weeks ago. (Between September 15 and October 19, there was a 12-point swing in the Gallup daily tracking poll.) Now ask yourself: What role has the Drudge Report played in that burst of campaign movement? The answer, of course, is zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. His trademark flashing red lights have gone missing.

The dynamics of the campaign have irrevocably changed, and the mighty Drudge Report, the news site Beltway journalists trip over themselves to genuflect in front of, has been a complete bystander in the closing weeks of the 2008 campaign. (Not that this is the first time Drudge has choked down the stretch of a nationwide election.)

The reason is simple. Because of the unprecedented economic turmoil, we're now in serious times. (Fifty thousand home foreclosures this year, in the state of New Jersey alone, is serious business.) And the Drudge Report doesn't do serious. The American public's attention has shifted from the campaign to the economy, and that's why the Drudge Report remains largely irrelevant to that unfolding story.

In fact, nearly two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) claimed economic conditions or the stock market drop were the news story they followed most closely during the second week in October, compared with just 24 percent who selected the campaign. Meanwhile, the credit crisis has unleashed waves of voter anxiety.

As long as those patterns hold, Drudge finds himself in no-man's-land with no levers of power to pull.

For instance, Drudge spent last week going all-in on the McCain "comeback" narrative. But rather than aping the line, most of the press corps demurred, simply because the nationwide polling data did not support the claim. In fact, as Howard Kurtz noted on washingtonpost.com on Monday, the press has pivoted in the opposite direction, with even conservative media commentators declaring the cause lost for John McCain.

One of the few times Drudge has come up in the national conversation was when conservative commentator Pat Buchanan almost got laughed off the set of Hardball after citing Drudge's unscientific reader poll to suggest Sarah Palin had been the clear winner of the vice-presidential debate. (See Crooks and Liars for the clip.)

And yes, it's true that post-Wall Street meltdown, Drudge did influence the campaign narrative when, on the eve of the vice-presidential debate, he trumpeted information about moderator Gwen Ifill's upcoming book. But that was ostensibly a get-the-media story; it didn't affect the Obama campaign or help to boost the Republican ticket. Most viewers still thought Palin lost the debate.

Other than that, Drudge has mostly been shooting blanks and remains unrecognizable from the 2004 campaign, when his site was central in pushing President Bush's re-election.

Why the misfires? As Halperin himself noted in 2006, "Matt Drudge is not doing stories on policy, on welfare, on healthcare. He's doing stories on the most salacious aspects of American politics. When that drives the dialogue, that's where the country heads, that's where our political coverage heads."

Thanks to our current economic crisis, "the most salacious aspects of American politics," as Halperin put it, have taken a vacation during the closing weeks of this campaign. And the press can't even pretend that those "salacious aspects" are remotely newsworthy, which means the second part of Halperin's claim, about Drudge driving the dialogue, no longer applies.

Halperin's writing partner John Harris admitted as much recently while addressing students at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. In an article on Harris' speech, the local paper reported: "The Republican Party's 'Machiavellian' style of attack politics hasn't struck a chord in this election, Mr. Harris said, leaving John McCain to shift strategies nearly weekly."

Note that that Machiavellian style of attack politics is pretty much code for the Drudge Report, which has been unplugged down the stretch.

Not that Drudge hasn't tried to lay gotcha (Machiavellian) traps on behalf of Republicans:

VIDEO: Liberal Outrage: A Pro-McCain March In Manhattan...

CBS REPORTER SHOCK CLAIM: OBAMA AIRPLANE SMELLS BAD; CAMPAIGN TREATS PRESS POORLY...

RAGE: Burning McCain campaign sign lands men in hot water...

JESSE JACKSON PREDICTS CHANGE IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY WITH OBAMA...

Joe Biden looks... different...

PAPER: Obama's NH event scraps National Anthem...

MCCAIN: OBAMA POLICIES SOCIALIST

PROBE: OBAMA SUPPORTER STOLE MENTALLY-CHALLENGED MAN'S VOTE?

POWELL FOR OBAMA: IT'S NOT ABOUT RACE

Not one of those Drudge headlines, all posted within the past week, led anywhere in terms of blossoming into larger, damaging stories for Democrats, let alone full-blown controversies. (The ACORN voter registration story, which Drudge has peddled incessantly, has also failed to take hold in the mainstream as a true campaign scandal.)

Yet the sad truth is that in previous campaigns, all those items stood a very real chance of being embraced by the Beltway press and becoming big stories. As Glenn Greenwald wrote last year:

The last two presidential elections were overwhelmed by the pettiest and most fictitious "controversies" (things like Al Gore's invention of the Internet and Love Story claims, John Kerry's windsurfing and war wounds, John Edwards' hair brushing and Howard Dean's scream), and our discussions of the most critical issues are continuously clouded by distortive sideshows concocted by this filth-peddling network. Their endless lynch mob crusades supplant rational and substantive political debates, and the most wild fictions are passively conveyed by a lazy and co-opted national media.

Still, despite Drudge's power outage this year, you won't see Harris or Halperin or any of the other Beltway players who lust after his attention ever mention that the Drudge Report's cache has been dented. That kind of talk is not allowed. Only constant adoration will do.

In fact, just this month, Halperin still counted Drudge among "the five most important people in American politics right now -- who aren't running for president."

And while liveblogging the final presidential debate last week, Jonathan Martin at Politico, which is part of Drudge's permanent cheering section, claimed that Joe the Plumber had been inserted into the national debate about taxes because McCain picked up his story from the Drudge Report.

" 'Joe the plumber' can thank "Matt theInternetist" for his instant fame," wrote Martin, who noted that "McCain first used this anecdote in his economic speech" on Monday.

The problem with that gratuitous hat tip to Drudge was that the Drudge Report didn't highlight Joe the Plumber until Wednesday, two days after McCain started talking about him. So, no, the Everyman does not owe his instant fame to Drudge.

But the Drudge fans at Politico ("he has an uncanny ability to drive the national conversation with what he chooses to highlight on his site") sure wanted to push that pleasing line.

And today, either Beltway insiders can't see that the media landscape has changed dramatically in recent weeks, or they're too afraid to acknowledge that their online emperor is missing some clothes.

*Footnote: I had to chuckle as I paged through The Way to Win for the first time since it was published in 2006. The book is about the blueprint for taking the White House and which politicians were positioning themselves for victory in 2008. I laughed because there was one name that did not appear anywhere in the book about the upcoming campaign, one name Halperin and Harris left out of the index: "Obama, Barack."

Kristol and Brooks play dumb at The New York Times

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:57:51 EST

Back in June, at a time when he felt Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign was stuck in neutral, National Review editor Rich Lowry suggested that a quick-fix for the Republican candidate would be for conservative thinker and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol to take a temporary leave from the paper and officially join the McCain team.

"Why the McCain Campaign Needs Bill Kristol," read the headline to Lowry's piece.

The temporary leave never happened; Kristol has remained at the paper throughout the campaign. But looking back, perhaps Lowry was being too logical in suggesting Kristol hit the pause button on the Times while he became intimately involved advising the GOP candidate. Because it appears Kristol may have benefited from the best of both worlds by keeping his high-profile Times gig while also helping steer the McCain team.

Of course, that kind of free-lance work would violate the Times' logical policy, which forbids journalists from advising politicians, even informally. (Columnists are supposed to comment on campaigns, not be part of them.) And previously, Kristol and the Times have both insisted the columnist has absolutely no hand in McCain's run.

But a recent report, which raises doubts about those denials, suggests Kristol was instrumental in lobbying for the McCain team to pick Sarah Palin as the GOP's vice-presidential candidate. That would explain Kristol's steadfast support of Palin in the face of so many conservative pundits expressing doubts about her.

One of those GOP-friendly pundits who recently tagged Palin as unqualified was Kristol's conservative colleague at the Times, columnist David Brooks. The twist however, was that Brooks did not broadcast his harshest Palin misgivings in his column. Instead, he expressed them during an exclusive media luncheon in New York City, just 72 hours after toasting Palin in the Times.

While journalists and luminaries dined at the elegant Le Cirque restaurant, Brooks, being interviewed onstage, announced Palin represented a "cancer" on the Republican Party and that she was "not even close" to being qualified for the office she's seeking.

Talk about burying the lead.

Because for somebody who gets paid a handsome salary to express his unvarnished opinion about politics in print, Brooks had done a stellar job keeping those bombshell revelations under wraps since Palin entered the race in late August.

Those recent incidents involving Kristol and Brooks are why the Times is facing something of a dilemma regarding its two conservative columnists. It appears that during the campaign season they haven't always been straight -- haven't been transparent -- with their readers. Instead, Kristol and Brooks appear to purposely use their columns to either camouflage their true feelings (for partisan reasons), or cloud their positions with conflicts of interest.

It's true that over the decades, The New York Times has employed a handful of columnists who enjoyed outsized influence within the Beltway and have, at times, left their big-foot impressions on the political landscape in a way most ordinary columnist could not, or would not.

But I get the feeling that most of the Times columnists today understand their job is to write what they actually think about current events while simultaneously staying out of the actual current events. For some reason, Kristol and Brooks have trouble adhering to that common-sense approach. And in the process they're devaluing the Times' op-ed page.

For instance, I cannot imagine discovering that liberal columnist Paul Krugman had been secretly advising the Obama campaign and worked diligently to make sure Sen. Joe Biden was picked as the Democratic running mate, the way Kristol reportedly did with McCain. And I can't picture the Times' Frank Rich writing column after column about Sen. Joe Biden's VP run and then showing up at a New York City media event to reveal grave misgivings about Biden; misgivings the columnist had never articulated before, the way Brooks did with Palin.

Bottom line: Do Kristol and Brooks understand the basic tenets of opinion journalism?

The question about Kristol's role in the McCain campaign refuses to go away. In 2007, McCain-friendly columnist Amanda Carpenter wrote that the GOP candidate himself, at a conservative-sponsored luncheon, name-dropped Kristol, who also edits The Weekly Standard, in response to a question about who the candidate regularly turned to for advice.

In February, right after Kristol joined the Times, McClatchy Newspapers reported that Kristol was part of McCain's "foreign policy team." Kristol denied the report, and his Times boss confirmed that as a columnist he would not be allowed to advise any candidate.

So how did the McClatchy reporter get the story wrong? Because McCain aides told the reporter that Kristol was an adviser.

And perhaps that's why the story persists to this day. In June, Newsweek reported, "McCain receives advice from several generations of Republican strategists ... [including] William Kristol."

And just as recently as last month, Fox News, which actually employs Kristol as an analyst, reported that "The top of McCain's team includes ... Bill Kristol" among "[i]nformal advisers."

And now comes the report from Scott Horton, writing for Tina Brown's new news website, The Daily Beast, that Kristol was deeply involved in the Palin pick and that behind the campaign scenes Kristol squared off against a Karl Rove-led group of advisers who were pushing Mitt Romney for the VP slot.

Wrote Horton:

[Kristol] has used his space as a New York Times columnist to tout [Palin's] candidacy repeatedly. But in the process Kristol has never bothered to disclose his role in the decision making process that led to the Palin pick. ... Bill Kristol, it seems, has much at stake in the Palin candidacy.

So the central question remains: Has Kristol, contrary to Times policy, been advising the McCain campaign? And if he feels that his advice has been ignored, is that why Kristol is lashing out at McCain in print?

Questions also swirl around Brooks and why, when covering the campaign, he writes columns that apparently don't reflect his true opinions; opinions that are much harsher toward the GOP than readers have been let on to know, and opinions that might do damage to the Republican ticket.

The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar captured video of Brooks telling the Le Cirque crowd on October 6 that Palin's plainly anti-intellectual style "represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party." And that she's "not even close" to being qualified for the White House.

As Greg Mitchell noted at Editor & Publisher:

It may or may not surprise you to learn that Brooks has not written a word about why the selection of someone "not even close" to be being qualified for vice president by a 72-year-old cancer survivor might disqualify John McCain from Brooks' consideration for his support.

Indeed, if Brooks thought Palin's disdain for ideas represented a "cancer" on the GOP, why did it take six weeks for him to say so? And why hadn't he found space in his many Palin-related Times columns to make that point? And if Brooks thought Palin was without question unqualified to be vice president, why didn't he insert the same, unambiguous language from Le Cirque ("not even close") in one of his columns?

The archive shows that prior to Le Cirque, Brooks had been broadcasting a much different message about Palin. Appearing on PBS, Brooks called the Palin pick an "outstanding" one, politically. Following the October 2 vice presidential debate, the Times pundit announced on television that Palin had been "fluid" and "confident" and that Republicans would be "quite pleased" that she had "held her own" against Joe Biden. Specifically, Brooks noted Palin was not a "wonk" (but that was OK) and he thought her me-against-Washington mantra was quite effective.

The next morning in his Times column, Brooks was just as effusive in his praise. Read this passage see if you think Brooks was cheering Palin or condemning her style:

It took her about 15 seconds to define her persona -- the straight-talking mom from regular America -- and it was immediately clear that the night would be filled with tales of soccer moms, hockey moms, Joe Sixpacks, Main Streeters, "you betchas" and "darn rights." Somewhere in heaven Norman Rockwell is smiling.

For Brooks on that Friday in the Times, Palin represented a rising star of the GOP.

By Monday, he transformed her into a cancerous element within the party. He just forgot to inform Times readers about his flip-flop.

Note that in an almost comical display of Beltway chumminess, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who interviewed Brooks during Le Cirque Q&A, rushed in to defend the Times columnist when word spread about his "cancer" comment. Dismissing the idea that Brooks hadn't been honest with his readers, Goldberg instead toasted Brooks and insisted he "is one of the rare columnists today who wrestles with himself constantly, and who lets the public watch him change his mind."

Of course, what Brooks has done this campaign season has been to actively shield the public from his true thoughts about Palin. But inside the Beltway's media elite club, where pundits from the Times and The Atlantic swap deep thoughts at Le Cirque, Brooks' double-talk about Palin passed for transparency.

It's true that on Friday, October 10, four days after his "cancer" comment, Brooks' Times column did raise more specific concerns about Palin and the danger her candidacy represented to the Republican Party.

Brooks wrote that, "No American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the 'normal Joe Sixpack American' and the coastal elite." He claimed that kind of politicking was causing the educated class to flee to Democrats.

Two quick points. First, Brooks' Friday column addressed how the GOP's creeping social class warfare (i.e. its disdain for educated voters), highlighted by Palin's approach, was costing Republicans votes. But that's not what prompted Brooks to call Palin a cancer four days earlier. At Le Cirque, Brooks specifically lamented the GOP's creeping anti-intellectualism (i.e. its disdain for ideas), which was highlighted by Palin's approach.

That means Brooks still has not shared with his readers why he thinks Palin represents a "cancer" on the party.

Second, aside from that disconnect, note that Brooks' tough Palin column appeared after he had been recorded discussing his apparently true feelings for the vice-presidential candidate.

Which raises the question: If Brooks' "cancer" comment hadn't been captured on Rachel Sklar's cell phone, would the columnist ever have copped to the idea that Palin's candidacy signaled real, long-term problems for the GOP?

The larger lesson may be that when reading a Brooks campaign column, Times subscribers really do need to ask themselves whether the dispatch reflects the writer's true opinion, or whether he's pulling his punches in order to help the RNC.

And when reading a Kristol campaign column, readers need to ask if he's acting as an opinion columnist or working more in a role as a quasi-campaign consultant.

Because right now, it's hard to tell with the both of them.