See No, Hear No

Patrick Cahalan in reply to North says:

This strikes me as a very significant error. Reporters are like dogs; if you run from them they’ll come baying at your heels but if you confront them head on they have a tendency to roll over and beg for scritches.

Politically speaking, I think this is a pretty astute observation and explains the media reaction to Paul vs. Obama without resorting to media political bias as an explanation.  It certainly tells you something about handling a media crisis and gives you the nod that Obama is better at it than Paul.  Since handling a media crisis is part of the job (like it or not), this is a factor.

I have to disagree with Doc, below: “Wright was not speaking in any capacity as a representative of Obama.  The stuff in the Paul newsletters was published by him, under his name, and the profits were his to enjoy.” <– association with someone with regrettable views is association with someone with regrettable views, which is the charge at the bar.  Not whether or not Obama is a black nationalist or Paul is a racist, but whether or not they associated with someone with regrettable views and what if anything that should tell the public about their judgment.

Wright may not be speaking in any capacity as a representative of Obama, but if you’re going to a church where Pat Robertson is the preacher for 5 years instead of some other church where someone else is a preacher I don’t think it’s unfair for someone to rake you over the coals for it implying that you are at the very least sat not unsympathetic enough that you’ll stick around to listen to the stuff you want to hear.  Maybe after five years in office when you haven’t shown homophobic tendencies we can call it a dead issue but when you’re still running, that’s a legit place for a reporter to go.

And I do think that if Obama went to Pat Robertson’s church he’d have gotten an awful lot more dogged persistence than him going to a black preacher’s church from your average white reporter, because it’s a lot easier on the privileged white psyche to champion gay people than it is to even appear to be giving the black guy a hard time about black nationalism or anything that might be regarded as such.

So I think Tom has a point… in that it is definitely the case that the mainstream media will give passes to some and interrogate others out of proportion to the actual severity of the question at hand; it’s part of the nature of the game, but it’s still a bad characteristic of the game.

And I thought the See No, Hear No was pretty pithy – Paul didn’t see the content and Obama didn’t hear the content (and it’s indeed a good line by Dole).  Certainly it’s a minipost, but we’ve had miniposts with far less substantive content.

For the record, I know next to nothing about Wright and I’ve heard all of four minutes of limited rantings which sounded pretty bad but (as I’ve said on other threads) it’s easy to make somebody sound bad when you clip out a tiny bit of a large bunch of anything, so I have no idea how “regrettable” the guy’s views actually are, but since Obama publicly repudiated them I think it’s fair to say that *he* thinks that people have a good reason to find them regrettable.

I’ll say this for Tom, quite often he is bobbing and weaving as accused, but that’s because in those cases he’s not trying to make a positive point about what he thinks, but instead he’s trying to make a negative point about what someone else thinks.  It can be annoying, but tweaking the beard of the liberals among the crowd is hardly out of bounds given that actual conservatives around here number all of two.

Mr. Carr and I are in agreement that it’s good to have his perspective around.Report