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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 6249
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: 
Votes: 2 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 21, 2007 - 08:27 pm: | 
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(I think it's because he's Black. They feel it's for all these other reasons.)
Clinton Drawing Harsher Scrutiny Than Obama, Some In Press Say
His Campaign Denies Assertion
By HOWARD KURTZ
December 21, 2007
Washington Post
DES MOINES — After weeks of bad news, Hillary Clinton and her strategists hoped that winning the endorsement of Iowa's largest newspaper last weekend might produce a modest bump in their press coverage.
But on Sunday morning, they awoke to upbeat headlines about their chief Democratic rival: "Obama Showing New Confidence With Iowa Sprint," the New York Times said. "Obama Is Hitting His Stride in Iowa," the Los Angeles Times said.
And on Monday, Clinton aides were so upset about a contentious "Today" show interview that one complained to the show's producer.
Clinton's senior advisers have grown convinced that the press deck is stacked against them, that their candidate is drawing far harsher scrutiny than Barack Obama. And at least some journalists agree.
"She's just held to a different standard in every respect," said Mark Halperin, Time's editor at large. "The press rooted for Obama to go negative, and when he did, he was applauded. When she does it, it's treated as this huge violation of propriety."
Although Clinton's mistakes deserve full coverage, Halperin said, "the press's flaws — wild swings, accentuating the negative — are magnified 50 times when it comes to her. It's not a level playing field."
Newsweek's Howard Fineman said Obama's coverage is the buzz of the presidential campaign. "While they don't say so publicly because it's risky to complain, a lot of operatives from other campaigns say he's getting a free ride, that people aren't tough enough on Obama," Fineman said. "There may be something to that. He's the new guy, an interesting guy, a pathbreaker and trendsetter, perhaps."
Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the accusation of softer treatment is untrue, but "the Clinton campaign whines about it so much, it becomes part of the chatter. No candidate in this race has undergone more investigations and examinations than Barack Obama has," he said, citing lengthy pieces in the Chicago Tribune and New York Times.
"As Obama says, running against the Clintons is not exactly a cakewalk. Their research operation has ensured that if there's any information about Obama to be had, it's been distributed to the media."
The question, of course, is what journalists do with that information.
Asked for comment about the coverage of Clinton, her spokesman, Jay Carson, said, "I'll just say that at the Clinton campaign, we do our best to live by the old adage that it's not wise to pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel."
For nearly a year, the New York senator was widely depicted as the inevitable nominee. But now many press accounts are casting her recent dip in the Iowa and New Hampshire polls as a disaster in the making.
"Slipping Away?" said a headline on ABC's "Good Morning America." "Hillary Clinton's campaign is teetering on the brink," Fineman wrote in Newsweek.
CBS's Jim Axelrod said her operation is "reeling." The Los Angeles Times said she is facing her "most serious crisis." And a banner headline on the Drudge Report asked, "Is It the End?"
When Clinton's New Hampshire co-chairman resigned last week after raising the issue of Obama's adolescent drug use, the issue itself received scant treatment in the press because Obama had disclosed it in his 1995 autobiography. "He has been able, by luck or planning, to control his own story, because he wrote it first," Fineman said.
The Illinois senator's fundraising receives far less press attention than Clinton's. When The Washington Post reported last month that Obama used a political action committee to hand more than $180,000 to Democratic groups and candidates in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the suggestion that he might be buying support received no attention on the network newscasts. The Clinton team is convinced that would have been a bigger story had it involved the former first lady.
There was also a lack of press pickup when the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder reported that an Obama aide had sat down next to him and "wanted to know when reporters would begin to look into Bill Clinton's post-presidential sex life."
Journalists repeatedly described Obama as a "rock star" when he jumped into the race in January. His missteps — such as when his staff mocked Clinton's position on the outsourcing of jobs overseas by referring to the Democrat not as representing a state, but as "D-Punjab" — generated modest coverage, but rarely at the level surrounding Clinton's mistakes.
Some reporters told Clinton aides when she enjoyed a double-digit lead that she is held to a higher standard as the front-runner.
Obama did undergo something of a press audit earlier this year, with stories focusing on his record in the Illinois Senate and his ties to indicted fundraiser Tony Rezko. But his recent rise in the polls has not brought the kind of full-time frisking being visited on the hottest Republican, Mike Huckabee.
In fact, much of the coverage of Oprah Winfrey stumping for Obama bordered on gushing.
In an online posting Monday, ABC reported that an Obama volunteer wearing a press pass asked the candidate a friendly question about tax policy at an Iowa event. But several of the assembled reporters huddled and concluded that it was not a story, one of them said.
Clinton faced a storm of press criticism over a similar planted question.
Some reporters confess that they are enjoying Clinton's slippage, if only because it enlivens what had become a predictable narrative of her cruising to victory.
The prospect of a newcomer knocking off a former first lady is one heck of a story.
http://www.courant.com/news/nationworld/hc-clinton1221.artdec21,0,4647592.story |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 5965
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, December 22, 2007 - 11:19 am: |
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Nonsense. She's getting a free pass because she's a lesbian. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 10948
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, December 22, 2007 - 02:38 pm: |
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How do you know Hillary is a lesbian? |
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