Clinton and the Media: Just the Same Old Story

The apparently intense resentment the Clinton campaign is expressing for how the media is covering the campaign spilled into Tuesday's debate in a fairly bizarre way, with Hillary attacking the questioners for--of all things--always asking her questions first. That this is a disadvantage is by no means obvious.

But on the larger point, it's true that the Clinton campaign is getting a bad press these days. Why? Because they're losing.

For much of this year, the media narrative was Clinton the Inevitable, the virtual incumbent, with unbeatable credentials, political machine, message discipline, etc. Well, as I've pointed out many times before, the media knows only one story arc: the rise, the fall, the resurrection. It's their version of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl (with the appropriate 21st century gender variations.)

So they gave her months of 'the rise to dominance', and then the story was 'alone at the top, swatting the knats around the throne.' But "happily ever after" is boring, and once that clearly was no longer the way things were going, then the Clinton story became "the fall," while the Obama story took over the "rise" storyline. With 11 straight victories, most of them lopsided, the rise of Obama was kind of a no-brainer, especially for the news media.

Sure, the fall of Hillary Clinton liberated some bias, both conscious and unconscious, against women, but also liberated resentment against the Clintons (especially when Bill Clinton got so deeply involved), and specifically against how Hillary's campaign hectors the press, responds to questions by belittling the question itself, and so on. People will take that as long as they have to, when they were covering the rise of the Inevitable. Now they don't have to.

The media is covering dissension within the Clinton campaign and among her supporters. Nobody cares much about dissension in a winning campaign, where there is likely to be less anyway, though reporters store up those stories for later use. (There was a story recently about the Obama campaign being less accessible to the press: expect this to be resurrected... if he starts to "fall.")

At the debate, Tim "The Ferret" Russert turned his beady eyes and gleaming teeth on Hillary early and often, partly because she's been making the most provocative statements and exhibiting the most provocative behavior. What she's been saying and doing is new and news. I don't discount a certain amount of payback, and I don't like Russert in the first place (if you couldn't tell.) But if she's such a fighter and a survivor, she can't also be the victim.

Insofar as the pushback by the Clinton campaign is tactical, trying to force the press into different behavior, good luck. Clinton can get better press by changing the storyline. And she can only do that by winning Texas and Ohio by Obama-sized margins next Tuesday. Then they're happily off to the Resurrection. The story continues.

For more on the debate and campaign news: American Dash.