Someone Send George Stephanopoulos to J-School

This is the problem with former political staffers going into the media — they think reporting the news is like running a campaign (bolds mine):

The political fallout from the Philadelphia faceoff between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was all but eclipsed yesterday by a fierce debate about Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos.

The ABC moderators found themselves under fire for focusing on campaign gaffes and training most of their ammunition on Obama. Huffington Post blogger Jason Linkins called the debate “utterly asinine.” Washington Post television critic Tom Shales called the duo’s performance “despicable.” Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will Bunch said the moderators “disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself.”

Tough crowd out there.

“I think the questions were certainly pointed — tough at times, as they should be in a presidential debate — but not inappropriate or irrelevant at all,” Stephanopoulos said yesterday. “The questions have been part of this campaign and in the news. We did our job. You’re not going to satisfy everyone.”

Like I said yesterday, if the questions have been “part of the news” it’s because the corporate media jump on non-issues and manufacture controversies out of them through constant repetition in print, on television, and in online videos. News entertainers like Stephanopoulos say they must do this because it’s what the public wants — hence, Stephanopoulos’ response to Michael Calderone’s query about whether voters think that flag pins and Bosnia are relevant to their lives:

When I asked whether questions about flag pins or Bosnia are actually relevant to voters, he replied: “Absolutely.”

“The vote for the president,” Stephanopoulos said, “is one of the most personal” decisions that someone makes.

“When people make that choice, they take into account how candidates stand on the issues,” he said, but also are concerned with “experience, character [and] credibility.”

“You can’t find a presidential election where those issues didn’t come into play,” he said.

Glenn Greenwald, who has written a lot about this claim by the traditional media that they are just reporting what ordinary Americans want to know, calls it “the premiere manipulative, deceitful tactic of the Beltway pundit. …” and points to another notorious “practitioner of this corrupt method” — David Brooks:

… Today, in his New York Times column, Brooks again defends the tawdry, juvenile ABC “debate” and hauls out this tactic to do so:

But the fact is that voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut as clues about shared values. . . . When Obama goes to a church infused with James Cone-style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them. Obama has to address those doubts, and he has done so poorly up to now.

Brooks’ other post-debate piece is here.

Over 40 journalists, bloggers, and media analysts have signed an open letter to ABC News about the debate fiasco.

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