The Unintended Consequences of a Biased Media

If this were an isolated incident then it would be, well, just an isolated incident. How's that for a tautology? I don't feel like making the case for media bias against Republicans and conservatives -- it's obvious to me and obviously non-existent to others -- and it's been made many times before (here's just one small example) -- but I don't think such bias does anyone any good, including Democrats and liberals, even including their candidates.

That latter part is counterintuitive -- and yes, sometimes giving a candidate a free ride helps put him in office -- but in national elections, especially with the growth of talk radio and the Internet, it's often harmful to the Democrats when their eventual nominee isn't challenged enough by the media. The candidate doesn't get the vetting he would have during the primaries, a vetting which might have toughened him up for the rest of the campaign or made the Democrats choose a different nominee.

A lot of Democrats had buyer's remorse in 2004 when they realized they'd chosen a candidate who had some serious skeletons in his closet -- I'll be happy to debate anyone as to whether the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were honorable men or smear merchants -- and if the media had covered that story (the Vets had been telling it for months, and the networks and newspapers were paying it as much mind as they would, four years later, the story of Senator Edwards' lies and infidelity), either Senator Kerry would have been better prepared to respond to it or the Democrats would have nominated another candidate. And that candidate, who could not have been less dynamic than Kerry if he'd tried -- I'm assuming the rules would have prohibited a potentially renominated Vice-President Gore from using slides during the presidential debates -- might very well have won the election.

Senator Obama is an outstanding orator. Sometimes I find his rhetoric lofty but vacuous, while other times I find it substantive and powerful. But he's never been nearly as impressive when speaking extemporaneously, and his stump speeches -- for all his talk of change -- seem to have repeated the same stories, the same one-liners, and the same clichés (even if they're novel the first time, they're bound to become clichés by the hundredth) for months and months.

But the media only spoke of his political dynamism and didn't address this crack in his oratorical armor. Senator McCain made a proposal that was unprecedented in modern presidential history: to engage in dual town meetings, answering unscreened questions from ordinary citizens and without the formality and strictures of a typical presidential debate. Obama rejected the proposal.

Shouldn't the media have been curious as to why the man whose speeches many had compared to the greatest in our nation's history -- the finest of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy -- did not want to field questions side-by-side with his opponent? When it comes to written speeches performed with a teleprompter, McCain is not in the same league as Obama -- I don't think he's even playing the same sport -- but when he's speaking extemporaneously, McCain seems much more comfortable and effective than Obama.

Politically, it was probably a wise decision for Obama to reject McCain's proposal. But it's hard to rationalize the media's decision to virtually ignore that rejection, especially given Obama's claim to offer a new type of politics, one marked by post-partisanship and focused on policy. In the short run, it might have helped him for these paradoxes -- the great speaker who ducks the opportunity to speak side-by-side with the mediocre one, a man who wants the campaign to be about issues but doesn't want audiences hearing him and his opponent expressing their opinions in the same setting -- to have been ignored.

But here we are, less than 50 days before Election Day, and even CNN can't ignore this. Does it help Senator Obama that people are learning now that he's lost without a teleprompter? Does it help the Democrats? People see that Governor Palin, who's been on the national scene for half a month, has been lambasted because her first two speeches were scripted and delivered with a teleprompter and her first several stump speeches repeated a lot of the same notes. Now they see the media, for the first time, noticing that Senator Obama has been doing the very same thing for almost two years. Has the double standard now become impossible for the American public to ignore?