More than two months before the first votes are cast in Iowa and New Hampshire, an important primary is actually going on right now. Call it the Media Primary, and it is playing a major role in determining the eventual Republican nominee.
This primary takes place every election cycle. Whenever a candidate starts to emerge from the pack, he or she is subjected to heightened press scrutiny. Some survive, many don’t, and that’s healthy for the democratic process. If you cannot win the Media Primary, you probably would not make a very good president.
Take Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator who was a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1988. Asked about his reputation for extramarital flings, Hart replied: “Follow me around. I don’t care. ... They’ll be very bored.” When The Miami Herald did follow him, the paper uncovered Hart’s relationship with a young woman and torpedoed his campaign. Did voters need to know about Hart’s recklessness and lack of judgment? Clearly, yes.
As Mark McKinnon, a former media adviser to George Bush the Younger, told The Washington Post: “You cannot fake it at this level. It is designed to expose your flaws. The process of running for president is brutal. It strips you naked and runs you through the streets.”
Another version of the Media Primary emerges when an unfamiliar figure is nominated for vice president. (See Palin, Sarah.) Katie Couric’s questions and Tina Fey’s impersonations did more to sink Palin in 2008 than anything else.
The media must play fair and put both Democrats and Republicans under the microscope. Barack Obama certainly enjoyed favorable coverage during his campaign three years ago, but journalists have made up for that since. A recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that Obama has received the “greatest proportion of negative coverage” of any candidate this year.
In fact, Obama has lately been criticizing the press as a way of deflecting that negative coverage, a tactic usually employed by conservative Republicans like Palin. In a recent email to campaign supporters, his finance director, Rufus Gifford, objected to a newspaper story that said small donors were “slow to return to the Obama fold.”
“Sometimes the media gets so caught up in its own echo chamber that the story line separates from the facts,” Gifford complained. He advised supporters to pay no attention to “the inside-the-beltway media circus, or what the pundits are predicting.”
