BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The media coverage of the 2012 political campaigns continues to flood the airwaves, like the Mississippi River in Spring time with inaccuracies, hyperbole, exaggerations, innuendo, and outright falsehoods.
It is too bad the media doesn’t have a Fact-Check.com that does such an excellent job correcting the same drivel from the campaigns and the candidates. Keeping the media honest is more than Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz can handle. There’s too much to cover.
Just this week for example, there was the saga of Hillary B. Rosen, the liberal Democratic strategist and mouthpiece, who criticized Mrs. Romney for being a stay-at-home mom and condemned Mitt Romney for inequality toward women. Here is what she has been quoted as saying: “His (Romney’s) wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why we worry about their future.”
She apparently went on to say “there’s something much more fundamental about Mitt Romney, because he seems so old-fashioned when it comes to women. He just doesn’t really see us as equal.”
To me the latter statement is far more incendiary than the former. How many people really care what Hillary Rosen thinks? Those remarks, like so many others she has made, are so vitriolic, so prejudiced and so angry, they have no place in the public discourse intended to enlighten and inform the electorate.
What troubles me more than Rosen’s diatribes is the aggressive way the media has attempted to distance her from the Obama presidential campaign and the Democratic Party, so that what she says doesn’t taint them or give legs to a controversy that would be far more controversial if it were perceived that Rosen was representing their views as an insider.
CBS’s Nancy Cordes was quick to declare at the top of her report on the story April 12, that Rosen “is not connected to the Obama campaign,” which at worst is a lie and at best a deliberate deception. The Post also came to the defense of the Democrats. James Downie produced a jaw-dropping defense on the Post website.
Paul Farhi on Saturday wrote what I thought was going to be a good spinoff piece on the vast legions of talking-head political strategists who show up on every radio and television news show on the air in campaign season. Instead, the Farhi article was just another thinly disguised attempt to distance Rosen from team Obama. Farhi, I hope not with a straight face as he was writing, claimed that Rosen has “no official role in the Democratic Party, and said the Democratic National Committee denied that Rosen is involved with the DNC.
You just shake your head in disbelief when you see stuff like this. If Rosen has nothing to do with Obama or the Democratic Party why does CNN bother to give her air time as a “Democratic strategist.” For whom is she strategizing?
These quick-response, knee-jerk defenses of the Obama campaign and the DNC both discredit and embarrass the media.
They discredit the media because what Cordes and the others either said or implied is simply false. Rosen’s firm—her partner is former White House senior advisor Anita Dunn– is a paid consultant to the Democratic National Committee and to claim that Rosen is not consulting with the DNC is an absurd claim. There isn’t a recognized Democratic “strategist” in the country who does not regularly advise and consult with the DNC, just as their Republican counterparts do.
To say that Rosen is not connected with the Obama campaign is another falsehood. The Wall Street Journal, according to the RNC with whom I just consulted, reported that the Obama campaign suggested to DNC Chairman Wasserman-Schultz that she hire Dunn and Rosen, and she did. Columnist Michelle Malkin wrote on April 13th that according to White House logs Rosen has had meetings directly with President Obama, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and, guess who?, now campaign manager Jim Messina. She has also met with “a parade of communications/media team officials in both the West Wing ‘surrogate booking’ office and the East Wing.”
As Malkin concludes, “…when you collect and connect the dots, Rosen’s role as a surrogate hit-woman for the White House is unmistakable.” At the very, very least, the media apologists for the Obama campaign, should have acknowledged that relationship and the evidence that Rosen is, indeed, a surrogate spokesperson for the President.
Furthermore, what has been demonstrated dramatically since July of 2011 is that the relationship between the White House and the Obama campaign is seamless. The events that are “official” White House functions and those that are “campaign events” are virtually indistinguishable and therefore making White House surrogate Rosen, a surrogate for the campaign as well.
With all of that evidence in front of you or easily attainable, it is even more curious why the media jumped so quickly to distance Rosen from the President. Is it too cynical to suggest they were encouraged to do so by the White House-campaign complex?
Scott Pelley, who referred to Rosen only as a “pundit”, on down to Cordes and whoever wrote and approved her script, should be called on the carpet. At the very least, they owe their viewers an explanation. At best, Cordes ought to be pulled from covering politics; she surely does not have the political experience or journalistic judgment to do so.
There are other issues that ought to be addressed as well, particularly the double standard applied by media to Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals.
NBC reporter/commentator (you never know who is going to show up on the screen) Chuck Todd called the Rosen incident a “manufactured flap”. I am not so sure it didn’t deserve some attention—particularly the underlying issue–, but if you’re going to dismiss Republican criticism as manufactured flaps, then you damn well better dismiss the same tripe from Democrats who do the same.
Democrats criticize everybody from Rush Limbaugh to the Koch brothers, and call them spokespersons for and leaders of the Republican Party. The media repeat the allegation as thought it was gospel. If the media’s Rosen standards were applied to Limbaugh, Limbaugh and the Republican Party would be strangers.
Finally, the media, who take seriously their role to educate and inform the electorate have no business giving the Hillary Rosens of the world air time. Most of these “talking heads” contribute nothing positive to the public dialogue. They are either rude yellers and screamers or ventriloquist dummies repeating the talking points of their respective political parties. They are color commentators for what the media has made our political process, a caged spectator sport.
Coverage of campaigns is reaching a point where it no longer serves the public, except in its entertainment value. Just to put a fine point on it, you will note that all of the media ink and air time devoted to Rosen’s mindless comments, did not focus on the real issues about women and their role in society.
Do the platforms of either party reflect a “war on women” as both sides contend? If so, who are the combatants, who is caught in the middle, and on what intellectual ground is the war being fought?
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.