It's The Media, Stupid.
Brian Montopoli, Columbia School of Journalism: For the past two weeks or so, we've watched as a largely press-manufactured story has made its way from a little noticed CNN.com column to The Washington Post op-ed page to an Associated Press dispatch to a Jodi Wilgoren-penned piece in today's New York Times. The central claim of most of these pieces -- that, as
CNN's Carlos Watson wrote two weeks ago, "Kerry's
Inner Circle Lacks Color" -- seems dubious at best,
but that hasn't stopped the national media from
turning the story into this week's tempest in the
teapot.
"It's mainly the media that's driving this story," he
says. "The media loves these kind of stories," he
continued dryly, "in part because they tend to ignore
stories about minorities. This gives them a chance to
write a story about the Kerry campaign and have it
count as a story about minorities."
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.campaigndesk.org/archives/000483.asp
Critique and analysis of 2004 campaign coverage
from Columbia Journalism Review
Echo Chamber
April 30, 2004
Follow the Bouncing Ball
For the past two weeks or so, we've watched as a
largely press-manufactured story has made its way from
a little noticed CNN.com column to The Washington Post
op-ed page to an Associated Press dispatch to a Jodi
Wilgoren-penned piece in today's New York Times. The
central claim of most of these pieces -- that, as
CNN's Carlos Watson wrote two weeks ago, "Kerry's
Inner Circle Lacks Color" -- seems dubious at best,
but that hasn't stopped the national media from
turning the story into this week's tempest in the
teapot.
Let's have a look at how we got here.
The Watson column kicked things off with the complaint
that Kerry's closest advisors are mostly white.
Whether or not that's correct depends upon how you
define what Watson calls the "inner circle." The six
people whom Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill
described in The Washington Post last week as "real
insiders" are indeed white, but beyond that there are
a number of minority advisors who are close to Kerry,
including Marcus Jardotte, Art Collins, and Paul
Rivera. In addition, according to Watson, other "key
advisors and people of color" close to Kerry are Rep.
Harold Ford, Greg Meeks, Rep. Juanita
Millender-MacDonald, and Henry Cisneros.
"Despite these facts," wrote Watson on April 16, "if
Kerry's inner leadership circle remains the same, do
not be surprised if Bush points out the inconsistency,
a more effective issue than many Democrats can
imagine."
As it happens, the Bush campaign had no need to point
out this "inconsistency." Watson's column bounced
right into the Campaign Press Echo Chamber (CPEC),
where variations of it have been appearing ever since,
like a houseguest who keeps coming back no matter how
often you show him to the door. And as the allegations
kept coming, in the form of news stories and op-ed
page commentaries, they gained a certain faux
legitimacy through little more than repetition.
Eventually, as we've noted before, this sort of thing
can become conventional wisdom, and at that point it
does do more damage than any rhetoric from an opposing
campaign.
Colbert King of The Washington Post op-ed page was the
first to pick up on the CNN story. On April 24, King
wrote that he called Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie
Cutter for a rebuttal to Watson's allegations, and
when she argued that the answer hinged on what was
meant by "inner circle," he complained that her answer
was "truly Clintonesque." Cutter, wrote King,
identified a number of minority senior staff members,
but King doesn't tell us who they are; he also employs
a mocking tone when discussing the campaign's
"community outreach senior leadership," which is made
up largely of minorities.
Once Watson and King had gotten the ball rolling, AP
gave it a kick, in the person of reporter Genaro C.
Armas, who wrote a piece asserting that Kerry was
being criticized for "a lack of minority
representation at the upper levels of [his]
presidential campaign." For evidence, Armas
highlighted a core group of seven key Kerry staffers
who talk strategy with the candidate each morning.
Whoops -- turns out, as Armas acknowledges, two of the
seven are black and one is Hispanic. That means the
group, as described by Armas, is over 40 percent
minority -- as compared to an American population that
is approximately one-third non-white. (He does mention
three more white Kerry advisors further down in the
story.)
Apparently unconcerned that he himself has just cited
real evidence to the contrary, Armas pursues the
story, repeating that nonetheless "some black
officials and independent analysts" have expressed
concern about the racial makeup of Kerry's campaign.
We spoke to one of the three Kerry critics Armas
cites, David Bositis, a political scientist at the
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a
think tank focused on black issues. He told us his
remarks in the AP story were "severely limited."
"It's mainly the media that's driving this story," he
says. "The media loves these kind of stories," he
continued dryly, "in part because they tend to ignore
stories about minorities. This gives them a chance to
write a story about the Kerry campaign and have it
count as a story about minorities."
Today The New York Times' Jodi Wilgoren picked up the
bouncing ball and, upon examination, found it actually
deflating. Fortunately, Wilgoren's piece takes a
deeper look at the issue than those that came before
it, noting that critics -- who she actually names and
interviews -- are as much concerned about Kerry's
modest minority outreach efforts as they are about the
makeup of his inner circle. She also quotes Paul
Rivera, a senior Kerry advisor, who is at pains to
note that Kerry already has made four campaign sweeps
through Harlem and that he won by large margins among
blacks in the Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri
primaries.
Wilgoren ends her piece with an interpretation from
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who attributes the complaints to
old rivalries extending as far back as Jesse Jackson's
1988 campaign against another Massachusetts
politician, Michael Dukakis. Sharpton slyly adds that
he's uncertain whether the critics really want to see
Kerry's inner circle more diversified or whether
they're just launching "a job application through the
media." (Since Sharpton is a man who has freely
acknowledged that he hopes to use his own candidacy in
the Democratic primaries to find a cushy job on cable
TV, it may be that he's on to something.)
Wilgoren's piece is just multifaceted enough that it
may finally silence the parrots of the echo chamber --
or at least reduce their screeching to a few muted
squawks.
It won't take long to find out.
--Brian Montopoli
Posted 04/30/04 at 03:38 PM