A scorching legacy of 2008: Media Bias!

During the 2008 election, the media displayed a vacuum of interest regarding the sleazy habits and duplicitous lifestyle John Edwards was living. Despite all of the blunt indications that Edwards was a total fraud. Recall the bogus story about McCain affair that the New York Times didn't hesitate to splash across its front page, yet ended up costing the gray lady serious coin via a defamation settlement and was thoroughly debunked. The contrast in treatment is so shocking it induces a state of speechlessness. Byron York has some thoughts on the issue here. He states:

"An explosive scandal had been kept out of the press for months at a time when the man at the center was an important player in national politics. Why? 

Young thought it was because the Edwards camp so tightly controlled information that journalists weren't able to find sources to corroborate the Enquirer's reporting. While that may have been part of it, the fact was, many editors and reporters just didn't want to tell the story. 

Maybe they admired Edwards' cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth. Maybe they saw no good in exposing Edwards' sordid acts. Maybe they looked down on the National Enquirer. Or maybe they were just biased. "In the case of John Edwards," said Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, "even though it was clearly out there -- everybody in America knew about this well before CNN and the New York Times and the Washington Post got into this game -- there was still a great reluctance." 

Of course, in the end the story came out anyway -- but only after the sheer weight of Edwards' corruption made the facts impossible to ignore, even for sympathetic journalists."

Nothing new is being stated here. There are a multitude of problems that these revelations generate. From a business and ethics perspective the old print media really needs to step up their game in this age of the blogosphere and quick information dissemination to the masses. How can an organization maintain credibility when tales of shameless selective reporting and bias become so transparent? Here's a bold proposition, the New York Times and other print media should assign reporters of the opposite political party to cover candidates during elections. Perhaps this would create an incentive to focus on facts first and downplay the need to cover for a candidate because of sympathy for the causes they champion. Not ever going to happen, but using a metric to maintain an adversarial element could be a healthy incentive. This only goes so far though because we saw how reporters willingly grabbed at strings to try and discredit McCain. Is a further erosion of old media and more segmentation the answer or is it unreasonable to expect a media outlet to strive for semi-objective and straight-forward political coverage? Perhaps the fact that this laundry is being aired at all is a victory unto itself.

Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem. Shelby Steele spells it out.

I was reading this thoughtful opinion piece by Shelby Steele when I had the misfortune of getting fragged. Steele, one the keenest minds and observers on race relations, puts forth a compelling series of thoughts on what propelled Obama to the presidency. He contrasts him with Reagan and certain celebrities, examines the elements of symbolism involved, and he beautifully deconstructs the manipulation of perception that was essential to achieve the intergalactic fluke that was the 2008 presidential election. The closing paragraph eloquently states "And yes, white America conditioned Barack Obama to emptiness—valued him all along for his "articulate and clean" blackness, so flattering to American innocence. He is a president come to us out of our national insecurities."

Now that the blind euphoria around Obama is subsiding, the messiah's failings are becoming more apparent, and Obama's is star is clearly waning, I think America will devote some serious time and consideration to understanding just what the "hell happened" because in many ways 2008 was a fluke.

I chalked 2008 result up to the confluence of several factors:

On the election side, the Obama camp ran a highly disciplined and professional campaign. It was impressive. The McCain camp lacked discipline, never defined their territory, and allowed their internal divisions to boil the surface, disrupting the entire operation. I also think McCain lost the will to win, as he refused to exploit Obama's obvious weaknesses to his own advantage.

Bush fatigue, incompetent Republicans, and an exhaustion from the perception that we were losing in Iraq. This hurt Republican voter turnout and alienated independents.

The tabula rosa syndrome. Obama was able to be everything to everyone. Voters were able to project their aspirations onto him and see him as a vehicle for these dreams. While this proved inherently false ex post facto, and only works once, he had a mystifying sway over considerable segments of the voting population that I think drove voters to the polls on his behalf.

White guilt. Steele is a billion times more eloquent at flushing this out and in much greater detail than I could ever hope to. However, I noticed among some of my peers at business school, former colleagues, and contemporaries, that their whiteness or "pinkness" (as some of the more slavishly politically correct ones would say), was a liability to which the bore a burden. I think that they imagined casting a vote for Obama would somehow absolve them of the imagined sins that they were somehow accountable for in their own minds. It was the worst form of self-loathing, but, it clearly manifested itself heavily.

Energized democratic voter turnout. Blacks turned out in record numbers, as did younger voters, and other traditional democratic constituencies. There was an irrefutable energy shrouding Obama, and the historic nature of his campaign, that inflated this numbers. I also think Bush fatigue played a part, although not as much in energizing the liberal base, as deflating the GOP base. The irony of the high black voter turnout, is that while it increased Obama's margins, it also ensured that the gay marriage ban in California would pass, as black voters are overwhelmingly against gay marriage. The irony is priceless.