Dennis Myers, a Nevada columnist, writes:
The ascendancy of Howard Dean has illustrated many of the peculiar traits of the national press corps and the political system.
The Washington Post in July said Dean "is seen as the most liberal of the major Democratic candidates." Notice here the weasel words "is seen as." This sentence represents a campaign press corps (with the Post's own reporters in the forefront) portraying Dean as liberal and then describing the effect of its portrayal.
Well, it was The New York Times, not The Washington Post, that wrote this sentence, and Myers' selective quoting ignores the context (the thrust of the article is that Dean isn't actually all that liberal), but Myers poses a valid question about the echo chamber of politics coverage nonetheless:
How often does the press invent conventional wisdom, then fall back on it?
For example, in 2000, the media stereotype of President Bush had him pegged as unintelligent, despite early polls indicating that respondents saw Bush as more intelligent than Al Gore. Whenever he defied this "soft bigotry of low expectations," it was news. (I'll cite Bob Novak for this, asserting that all Bush had to do to pull off a successful debate performance against Gore was talk about foreign policy for 42 minutes without a hitch.)
When we're dealing with vague intangibles like the perception of a candidate, when is it fair or helpful to cite conventional wisdom?
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