Huff Post readers, bloggers, journalists, talk show hosts, onlookers: help me out. Find the pattern:
The New York Times trying to "vet" Obama. (On youthful drug use.)
The New York Times trying to "vet" Hillary Clinton. (On the state of her marriage.)
The New York Times trying to "vet" McCain. (On cozy ties with lobbyists.)
Each story went weirdly wrong. Each story left people scratching their heads: what were the Times editors thinking? Each was part of the "vetting" ritual in which the press imagines itself asking the hard questions of candidates who would be president. Each has a touch of the bizarre.
My question to you: what is going on here?
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1. Why won't she ask her accountant to give the media copies of her tax returns?
2. Why won't she make public the list of Clinton library donors?
He could have ALSO asked about the ethics of Bill's billion dollar uranium deal in Kazakhstan for a Clinton donor.
He could ask today why "bitch" is an acceptable word to Hillary to describe women (including herself) but "pimped out" warranted "more than suspension"?
Zenobius: "Vetting" was actually my word, not theirs. I don't think Times people would deny that is how they see their role, however.
Here's an answer to my question that came in at Romenesko. I don't know if Larry Kart, the author and a former newspaper journalist, is right, but it's an interpretation I see as relatively plausible and suggestive.
"The common thread here, and the main reason for the bizarreness, is that the real subject of all these stories is the Times itself --and/or the image the Times thinks it's creating or would like to create for itself when it runs an ostensibly major story about a subject that is or will become of common interest.
"The same is true of many other broken-backed stories in the Times and a host of other papers since, probably, the mid 1970s or early 1980s. At least that's the time when I began to see that sort of stuff in action at the paper where I used to work. A particularly revealing early warning sign was when that paper, with a long tradition of rock-ribbed Republicanism, began to seach for some attractive, young, fairly liberal candidates for local offices that it could endorse, while it never dreamed of endorsing (and hasn't dome so to this date, I believe) a non-Republican for president, governor, or senator. It slowly occurred to me that these seemingly against-the-grain local endorsements were in effect advertisements for the paper, a way of signaling to a body of potential readers that the paper very much wanted and needed to attract that the paper was an attractively against-the-grain enterprise, a place of supple independent thought rather than a stern grandfatherly GOP bastion.
"Similarly (but along different lines, given its own history) the Times is dancing in front of a mirror here, trying to move in ways that telegraph to a somewhat imaginary audience that it is a truly supple paper -- iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image (if the "facts" of a story require that it be so) and certainly capable of seeing all sides of all issues. Thus these Times stories were mis-conceived and mis-edited so as to incorporate and express the paper's own image-shaping needs; and the "facts," such as they were, were pushed about one way and another toward the end. The paper is not so much a paper anymore; it is itself a candidate."
In other words, institutional narcissism explains what's going on.
The NY Times is feeling defensive, because what is "news" is being contested from both the left and the right, on the Internet. So, now that it is actually less important than it used to be, it has to mount a PR campaign to defend its position. Thus, the rather presumptuous assumption by the NYT that it is actually responsible for "vetting" the candidates. Back when it was obvious to all that candidates had to be at least acceptable to the NYT, it was unnecessary for it to publicly bill its stories as candidate vetting. What the NYT ran whatever it chose to run, was just news.
This is probably a good thing. Still, the lack of a neutral arbiter between readers of the Huffington Post and watchers of Bill O'Reilly may eventually become a problem. In any event, the NYT is unsuitable for this role.
Anyway, I think the Times has undertaken this project, if you will, to demonstrate their fair-and-balanced bonafides; probably a hair-brained idea of one of their editors. But rather than really dig deep and unearth God knows what, where one candidate may end up with a much bigger scandal to deal with than other candidates will (and thus appear to be out to get him or her) they float a vaguely suspicious story on each, and each story is comparably weightless but apparently critical.
I don’t know, it really doesn’t make much sense to me, but how else can you explain it? You’re the journalism professional, not me. Does that make sense??
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They can to some degree. See Kucinich or Edward's campaigns for reference.
But I'm hoping the collective is less vulnerable to media manipulation than we used to be.
Totally sick of being lied to.
The Times doesn't ask the real questions and ignores the real issues. Like Israel/Palestine or financial regulation or tax policy or income maldistribution.
The NY Times, like the Washington Post and most of the media, has sold out to the neocons and the plutocracy.
Do I win a prize?
See, the problem is, that information has been available for quite awhile. However, not a day has passed, and I cannot imagine a day passing through to November, where you do not read or hear multiple people state they know nothing about Obama's plans, positions, etc. The simple fact is that the people who continue to insist Obama is an empty suit are people who have no desire or intent to look under the fabric.
Obama supporters can whine about her record all they want, her record is real and strong. His is flimsey and a paper list for a paper tiger.