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The Press and Rudy and Bill
Posted by Kevin

Ezra has a question:

But it gets at an important truth: That the media does, indeed, come together to repel perceived threats. In Clinton’s case, it was a gauche striver. He was a threat to DC’s prestige, or vision of itself. Not the greatest danger in the world, but the media was quite effective in kneecapping him.

So what of Rudy? Rudy, after all, is a danger to the world. Every reporter in this town knows that he’s become a pandering lunatic. Why doesn’t Time have cover stories asking “Is hGiulianie out of his #($*^ mind!?” Why aren’t the Sunday shows filled with horrified reporters agreeing to disagree about much of the race, but uniting against the apocalyptic stupidity on evidence in the GIuliani campaign? Why aren’t the various horserace reporters fitting every successive foreign policy pronouncement into an overarching narrative of Giuliani’s crazed belligerence, “which is causing serious doubts about his campaign among some in the GOP?” There is precedent for all this. And in Giuliani’s case, the threat has the added benefit of being true. You don’t need to make anything up, invent any scandals, concoct any problems. You just have to honestly evaluate the words coming out of Giuliani’s mouth, the rhetoric coming out of his campaign, and the advisers circling the candidate. It’s all there. There’s no blowjob, I know, but there’s a real threat, and the media should, in its role as guardian of some minimal level of competency within the political process, be pointing out that this man is dangerous, his statements scary, his campaign unsettling and his advisers insane.

The majority of the answer is that our beltway press does not consider Rudy to be nuts. There are other reasons, of course: the press has many more conservatives in national commentary positions than liberals, it has been attacked so often formthe right that much of it flinches at the mere thought of criticizing a right-winger, and the “he-said-she-said” ethics of modern journalism all conspire to prevent a full on Clinton-like media feeding frenzy. But the core of the issue is that the press and the foreign policy establishment just don;t think Rudy is all that out there.

It is an article of faith among the beltway political press that the anti-Vietnam protests killed the Democrats on national security until the end of time. As a corollary to that belief, it is “understood” that the best political play is to always go as pro-war as possible. There is literally no position a hawk can take that, with the possible exception of a nuclear first strike or an invasion of England, that our press will deem insane. After all, we all know that the dirty hippies destroyed the Democrats on national security, so the more hawkish the better! And since our national press has an almost allergic reaction to actually covering anything other than the horse race, it simply doesn’t occur to most of them that there is anything wrong with what Rudy is doing and saying.

Our foreign policy establishment might be able to push a “Rudy is crazy” meme, but policy doesn’t play a large role in our press coverage and, frankly, our foreign policy establishment would not necessarily think Rudy is insane. Our foreign policy establishment that generally considers serious foreign policy thought to start with the “right” of the United states to intervene military anywhere it chooses. Diplomacy, while not altogether discounted, is not seen as the mark of a serious person and avoiding a war altogether or the outright rejection of this neo-imperialistic mindset means banishment from the foreign policy establishment. In a very real sense, there just aren’t enough people who think Rudy is nuts in the press or the people to whom the press listens to make enough noise to overcome the conservative bend to the media nor the “he said she said” nonsense that passes for journalistic ethics in this day and age.

October 30th, 2007 General, Politics, Media | one comment