In my post on Katie Couric’s interview of Obama, I made one point about the pros and cons of heavy media coverage: “Imagine if Obama had talked about the ‘Iraq-Pakistan border’ while he was in Iraq.” That McCain line is the subject of a Howard Kurtz story in the Washington Post about how the mainstream media are starting to—trepidatiously—look at a string of recent McCain gaffes (or, depending on your point of view, “gaffes”):
He has been making a series of verbal slips — invariably described as “gaffes” — that are starting to ricochet from liberal blogs to the mainstream media. And fairly or not, some critics are suggesting the 71-year-old Republican candidate is showing his age.
Leave aside how newsworthy his statements are at all for a second. (We’ll get to that.) The story, and the way it’s becoming a story, is a good example of one of the nuances that tend to get overlooked in critiques of “unfair” press coverage. One reason the press tends to cover different candidates differently is that it often bases its news judgments on whether an event or statement fits an existing narrrative for the candidate.
If Obama had made the same slips, for instance, it would have fit right into the well-established “Is he experienced enough?” narrative. McCain has no such ready-made press narrative. But as Kurtz says, his slip-ups may become news if they fit into a narrative the press does have for him: the “Is he too old?” narrative. But that’s a tougher, trickier, more fraught journey, because even if the media is not as nervous about ageism as about sexism or racism (after all, most media outlets make their money off advertising models that devalue old people), it’s still an -ism nonetheless, and so it makes reporters leery.
But there’s always the classic “some say” entree, and once “some” start “saying,” McCain’s gaffes could suddenly be a story.
Now in general, I think that the press tends to blow verbal gaffes way out of proportion, particularly those of the substituting-one-placename-for-another or messing-up-the-foreign-leader’s-name variety. I’ll say that whether it’s McCain or Obama (whom I voted for in the primary). If there is actual evidence that a candidate is suffering the effects of age, then it should manifest itself in other ways too, and we should focus on those. Otherwise, the bigger policy differences between Obama and McCain—particularly their much different views of what the U.S.’s greatest threats are and how to fight them—are much more important than who would win the Geography Bowl.
But that’s just my opinion. More important, if it does matter that a candidate botches the names of countries, then it should matter regardless of who does it or why he does it. Slavishly following the narrative that campaign coverage shouldn’t make it more or less of a story.
But the narratives are out there and they’re powerful—and while they aren’t the same as bias, they often end up having the same effect.