Corrupt Corporate Media Buffoonery

by Turkana

The flip side of the sudden but expected media assault on Barack Obama is their continued fluffing of John McCain. Washington Post hacks Juliet Eilperin and Robert Barnes offer a simple case study of how it works. The Post and the New York Times both, this morning, highlight articles about the McCain campaign's Bushist dirty politics. As Times writer Jim Rutenberg explains:

After spending much of the summer searching for an effective line of attack against Senator Barack Obama, Senator John McCain is beginning a newly aggressive campaign to define Mr. Obama as arrogant, out of touch and unprepared for the presidency.

On Wednesday alone, the McCain campaign released a new advertisement suggesting — and not in a good way — that Mr. Obama was a celebrity along the lines of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Republicans tried to portray Mr. Obama as a candidate who believed the race was all about him, relying on what Democrats said was a completely inaccurate quotation.

The Republican National Committee began an anti-Obama Web site called “Audacity Watch,” a play on the title of Mr. Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope.” And, in a concerted volley of television interviews, news releases and e-mail, campaign representatives attacked him on a wide range of issues, including tax policies and energy proposals.

The moves are the McCain campaign’s most full-throttled effort to define Mr. Obama negatively, on its own terms, by creating a narrative intended to turn the public off to an opponent.

Boilerplate Republican sleaze: you can't win on the issues, so try to win by destroying your opponent.

Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.

If the word "Rovian" comes to mind, it's literally valid. McCain has assembled some of Rove's team. Of course, any politically conscious being has long known it would come to this, just as any politically conscious being knows that it will only get worse and nastier. As the Drudgerific Politico's Carrie Budof Brown notes:

Perhaps one of the clearest indications emerged Tuesday from the world of late-night comedy, when David Letterman offered his “Top Ten Signs Barack Obama is Overconfident.” The examples included Obama proposing to change the name of Oklahoma to “Oklobama” and measuring his head for Mount Rushmore.

“When Letterman is doing ‘Top Ten’ lists about something, it has officially entered the public consciousness,” said Dan Schnur, a political analyst from the University of Southern California and the communications director in John McCain’s 2000 campaign. “And it usually stays there for a long, long time.”

Following a nine-day, eight-country tour that carried the ambition and stagecraft of a presidential state visit, Obama has found himself in an unusual position: the butt of jokes.

Jon Stewart teased that the presumptive Democratic nominee traveled to Israel to visit his birthplace at Bethlehem’s Manger Square. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd amplified the McCain campaign’s private nickname for Obama (“The One”).

Anyone paying attention also knew that the Obamabot cult would play nicely into this narrative. But neither the McCain camp nor the Obamabots are ostensibly objective or honest. There's still a prevailing myth, among some, that the media are. Well, let's look at that article by Eilperin and Barnes:

As Election Day nears, McCain's campaign is adopting the aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of Karl Rove, the GOP operative who engineered victories for President Bush. The campaign continued the attack Wednesday with a sarcastic television ad deriding Obama as a "celebrity," part of an intensifying effort to cast him as an elitist.

Good. Factual. To the point. But the very next paragraph...

But the sharp-edged approach is being orchestrated for an unpredictable candidate who often chafes at delivering the campaign's message of the day. It is that freewheeling style that has made him popular with voters and cemented his reputation for candor and straight talk.

And which freewheeling style would that be? Which candor and straight talk? The ones that the corporate media are working so hard to sell us? Can we have some examples, please? Is following the Rove model of personal political attacks candid and straight? Perhaps Eilperin and Barnes are so deeply embedded in the nether regions of the Beltway Bloviators' narrative that they haven't been able to notice that McCain is actually accumulating an expanding list of flip flops. Perhaps they haven't bothered googling the words "McCain" and "lies."

It takes literally no effort or thought to repeat that false myth about candor and straight talk. If media hacks such as Eilperin and Barnes were forbidden to use the words "straight talk," or were required to give examples, whenever they did us them, they wouldn't be able to write about McCain at all. It would only require a minimal level of competence for an even minimally intelligent reporter to create an honest narrative about McCain's dirty politics. It's who McCain is. It's what he is about. But that assumes that corporate media hacks care about honest reporting. I'm guessing that Eilperin and Barnes are minimally competent and intelligent.

Stay tuned. This will only get worse.