Tuned In

Look Who's Running Against the Media

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Last night at the debate, Barack Obama parried a charge from John McCain that he would raise taxes on people making $42,000 a year by saying, “Even Fox News disputes it, and that doesn’t happen very often when it comes to accusations about me.”

Obama seemed to be trying to end on a wry note there, but he makes a more straightfaced charge against Fox in an interview with Matt Bai for the New York Times Magazine:

“I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls,” Obama told me. “If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me, right? Because the way I’m portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?”

OK, first: isn’t running against the media what you’re supposed to do when you’re losing the election?


Obama’s hardly the first Democrat to complain about a Fox News effect: Al Gore, for one, has been sounding that alarm for a long time. And partisan anger at Fox was the reason that Democrats—wrongheadedly, I believe—froze out Fox during most of the primary. But really: when you’ve become a more permanent icon of American magazine covers than Angelina Jolie, are you really the guy to be complaining about the media filter?

I’m not naive enough to say that the media does not affect politics. Likewise—when it comes to issues like TV and decency—that popular culture affects people’s beliefs and behavior. But in both cases, I think it’s far more complicated than portrayed—if not altogether impossible—to quantify what the effect is, how great it is and in precisely what direction it goes. And generally when people try to say that people watched X and therefore did Y, whether you’re talking teen sex or voting, they’re making excuses or working an agenda. (There’s are a lot of media critics out there nowadays; shockingly, very few of them complain that the media is biased in favor of their candidates.)

Let’s go back to Fox News. Yes, Fox employs a lot of hosts with a thing against Obama. They’ve driven messages against him and his campaign. Throw in right-wing radio, too, with an arguably greater reach. But if you’re going to count that, how do you offset it with the vast amount of pundit support and newspaper endorsements Obama has? Or the rise in the past few years of the left-leaning blogosphere? And then how do you offset that with the residual affection some of the political press has for McCain’s Straight Talk Express days?

[Update: I’ll put it another way. “If there were no Fox News, I’d be up two or three percent.” OK… but if there were no Fox News, would there be no Sean Hannity? No Bill O’Reilly? Would their attitudes, their impetus, their arguments—and their audience—not exist? Would they simply be aggregated somewhere else, or did Fox News create them singlehanded? If there were no Fox News, would there be something else in its place? And if you ask this question, don’t you have to ask what would happen if there were no Huffington Post, no Daily Kos, no Keith Olbermann…? The number of potential alternate media universes is endless.]

Like many conspiracy theories, those against the media affecting the election tend to assume their target is unrealistically competent. But what about unintended consequences? Let’s say Fox News was instrumental in driving Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers into the national conversation. Not exactly what the Obama campaign wants. But there’s also a popular theory right now that focusing on Ayers, and other right-media-driven character attacks, has if anything hurt the McCain campaign. If that’s true, you have to assign partial credit, or blame, to Fox et al., whose pushing of the stories contributes to the perception of negative campaigning, even if they’re acting entirely independently of the McCain camp.

Or take an example from the media-for-Obama argument. If Obama had won New Hampshire after winning Iowa, would the primary even have lasted through June? There’s a credible—and like all these arguments, unprovable—case that Clinton’s surprise win was in part the result of contrarian New Hampshire voters reacting against the media’s assumption that Obama was unstoppable. (One of the oldest primary truisms is that Granite State voters don’t like to be told how to vote.)

I’m not trying to claim the media has no effect on anything. Just the opposite: the media has so many effects on so many things that it’s oversimplifying, if not disingenuous, to claim that one can net out its overall percentage effect one way or another. And to do that, you usually have to throw out a fair amount of contrary evidence. If the liberal media is electing the Democrat, for instance, how did it get so much better at doing that in the last four years?

Conversely, if Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has it so thoroughly in for Obama, they might want to reconsider their decision to get Major League Baseball to push back the start of a World Series game so Fox entertainment network can air a 30-minute Obama commercial. Then again, maybe it all fits into their evil plans somehow.