"This is what's nice about Iowa being the first-in-the-nation caucus: you can sit in a room this size with, what, 14 people, and hear him," Mr. Wright said. "The problem, with Obama and Hillary and even Edwards now, is that the crowds are getting too big. You can't do this anymore." -- George Wright. Fort Madison, Iowa.
Why is this photo such an outrage?
Because it ridicules candidate Biden for his lack of attention in Iowa, what with the tiny room, the cheap wood panelling, the empty chairs, the introduction overkill, and, yes, even that perfectly-centered plastic bucket. Where the shame really belongs, however, is with the major media. But it's not just for turning campaigns into horse races, and creating near-instant "also-rans" based on early fundraising numbers, early key endorsements and massively-premature polling.
It is also for the act of "innocent bystander" journalism that the article, paired with this photo, so brazenly commits.
In this NYT story, titled "A Senate Star Sparkles Less on the Stump," Michael Cooper writes:
It is a plight familiar to quite a few candidates who find themselves at the back of the Democratic pack this year -- candidates who barely register in news accounts of the campaign despite impressive résumés that distinguish them from many of the more unorthodox also-rans of campaigns past.
Even with their considerable credentials, Democrats like Mr. Biden; Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a former ambassador to the United Nations; and Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the chairman of the banking committee, find themselves lumped in with the kind of candidates who are usually unable to break into public consciousness unless they fall off a stage at a pancake breakfast or suffer some other mishap. For them it is a vicious circle: low poll numbers discourage news coverage, and a lack of coverage makes raising poll numbers difficult.
Somebody please tell me how The Times has the nerve to make reference, over and over again, to candidates "barely registering" and being "lumped" hopelessly together -- but to write it diligently down like they have absolutely nothing to do with it?
What really kills me, though, is the next paragraph:
"I didn't think, to use a trite expression, that all the oxygen would be sucked out of the air for so long," Mr. Biden said in an interview. And breaking through, he said, is difficult because his campaign has received such little attention from national reporters, especially compared with the wall-to-wall coverage his race for president drew two decades ago. "I thought you guys would be out here a lot sooner," he said.
Out here a lot sooner!!
What, like the spell is broken and The Times has suddenly signed on for parity-coverage of the Biden Express? Get real. Only in Denial World would someone doubt the Times printed this story to fill their "also-ran" quota, and then dropped in that last quote to make themselves feel better.
For more of the visual, visit BAGnewsNotes.com.
(image: Doug Mills/The New York Times. October 9, 2007. nytimes.com)
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Posted October 11, 2007 | 04:57 AM (EST)