December 14, 2007
Back Talk III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that “since talking back to journalists seems to work so well, I wonder why candidates so seldom do it. Journalists, after all, have public approval ratings on a par with congressmen and people who talk on cell phones at the movies.” Alexander Burns replies that “confronting the media works well sometimes, but when the tactic fails, it can fail very, very badly.” If this is true, why is it true? Why does attacking the despised media fail? My first and perhaps unthinking response is that nowadays the press often sticks together and holds grudges, while very sustained attacks on some politicians can go unchallenged by what would once have been the faction of the press nominally favoring their own side. Press assaults on Clinton and Blair, for example, were immoderate, amazingly persistent, and in the long run effective, and more effective because essentially unchallenged. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, none of them right-wing papers, long exulted in Clinton-baiting, just as in the U.K. the distinctly left Guardian and the Mirror were pretty savagely anti-Blair. It is logically possible that this is because Clinton and Blair were uniquely odious men, but it seems more likely that they were gifted politicians who had aroused the envy and malevolence of journalists nominally sympathetic to the parties they led. They were simultaneously attacked by the press controlled by their avowed enemies, for example The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in this country and the Telegraph in Britain. When the press consistently depict itself as the hero/victim of modern politics rather than one of the often abusively powerful, criticizing it is understandably hazardous. In a more general sense, modern politicians as a class have remarkably few friends in the British and American press, and in some cases too few avowed enemies. I have the impression that in the old days, the press was seen as controlled by rich men with obvious political loyalties, so you could discount hostile coverage from the predictable sources and rely on partisan support from your own side. The modern press is more likely to affect neutrality, so its attacks are less readily dismissed as mere partisanship. Since the press’s motives, while sometimes very ugly, are more complicated than mere partisanship, it is harder to counterattack the press.
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