The Empire Strikes Back
John Harris and Jim Vandehei defend ABC News’ “process” (as opposed to policy) questions at the Democratic debate in Philadelphia:
My, oh my, but weren’t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week’s presidential debate.
Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner’s personal associations and his electability. Where was the substance? Where was the balance?
Where indeed. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining.
That’s still a good response now that it is Obama partisans — some of whom are showing up in distressingly inappropriate places — who are doing the whining.
Actually, most of the criticism directed at Clinton, at least by Obama supporters, has had to do with her own near-exclusive focus on “process” issues, gaffes, guilt by association attacks, and spurious claims about electability. Wednesday night’s performance by Gibson and Stephanopoulos was just more of the same. The traditional media has been gleefully running with “gotcha” journalism against Obama for months now.
