Washington Post

For a while, I thought that newspaper endorsements were irrelevant, that most people didn't care what a bunch of editorial staff writers thought.  For general election Presidential contests, I think this is still true.  This is the case in most state and local general elections as well.

But I do think that newspaper endorsements are valuable in primary elections, depending upon the ideological orientation of the editorial page.  The Washington Post's endorsement of Creigh Deeds may have been the spark that got him the momentum to wallop Terry McAuliffe.  It's no secret that the Post has a liberal editorial page (though less reflexively liberal than the New York Times).  For its Northern Virginia readers, especially in the Democratic enclaves of Arlington and Alexandria, the Post is a very influential political and cultural authority.  Previous to the Post endorsement, Deeds was sort of an obscure, rural Democrat who would seem to have real problems competing in NoVa with McLean based McAuliffe and Alexandria native Moran.  But once the Post gave their seal of approval to Deeds, he became acceptable to NoVa liberals, not to mention a source of curiosity as reflected in the Google search spike Patrick has highlighted.  I guess Democratic primary voters liked what they saw in Deeds.

I think a comparable analogue in recent years was the Manchester Union-Leader's endorsement of John McCain in December 2007.  As you may recall, McCain was left for dead in the summer of 2007 after the failure of Amnesty part two.  McCain never left the race and changed to a scaled down campaign.  After problems with the Giuliani campaign began showing up, McCain had the opportunity to win the 40-45% of the Republican primary voters that shifted between Giuliani and McCain.  Starting in November, McCain began coming back from the dead as many voters were willing to give McCain another chance in light of other campaigns falling apart.

The Union-Leader is perhaps the most influential conservative editorial page in the country behind the Wall Street Journal.  This outsized influence was due to New Hampshire's first in the nation primary and the low tax advocacy by the Loeb family, owners of the paper.  To put it mildly, the Union-Leader has credibility with New Hampshire conservatives.  So when they came out for McCain, it elevated him to serious contender in New Hampshire, and soon after, the rest of the country.

The common element with both endorsements is that they were in primary elections and they were made by papers with well known ideological slants.  Their endorsements were influential because members of each party's ideological base trusted that paper's editorial page as an arbiter of good political sense.  By contrast, the Union-Leader's general election endorsement was virtually meaningless, considering that anyone who likes the Union-Leader was already voting for McCain, while those who didn't wouldn't pay attention anyway.  I suspect that the Post's nearly certain general election endorsement will not have much of an impact either.

One of the most interesting consequences of this recession will be the dramatic reordering of media in America. Many local newspapers will go out of print. Even big national organs like the New York Times will not be immune to these pressures. Internet news will become more and more pervasive.

The copyright cartels of the MSM will raise a hue-and-cry. Many will bemoan the loss of professional news journalism in many metro areas. But the fact is that theirs was always a flawed system. A single publication that mashes up the news, editorials, sports, business, the comics, and the classifieds is a fundamentally flawed product in the 21st century when the Internet gives us deep-dive ability on any particular topic that interests us. 

Outside.in founder Steven Johnson gave a great talk in March showing how the new way in media can be better than the old. The transition from old to new media is not unknown -- it's already happened in technology journalism, which used to be dominated by a set of monthly magazines with two-month-old news and is now thoroughly ruled by a flourishing and profitable ecosystem of blogs and podcasts that can bring you the latest Apple announcement in seconds.

The next media vertical to be revolutionized is politics, and it's already happening. Take a look, for instance, at this rundown of headlines from Sunday night in the Politics section of the Washington Post, including blogs, and stack it up to everything on the Politico's homepage, which doesn't have a print product to speak of and is very much the upstart:

At 5:19 pm I received an e-mail entitled "Breaking News Alert" from the Washington Post: 

Poll: Most Americans Back Obama on Stimulus, Mortgage Plans Large majorities support president's $787 billion economic stimulus package and $75 billion plan for stemming mortgage foreclosures, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Obama's bipartisan support, however, has eroded substantially in the past month, with just 37 percent of Republicans approving of how he has done his job. 

At 7:02 pm, a fellow contributor here at The Next Right received a similarly titled email from The New York Times: 

Poll Shows Broad Support for Obama's LeadershipPresident Obama is benefiting from high levels of confidence among Americans about his leadership, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most Americans faulted Republicans for their response to the president.Mr. Obama will deliver his first address to Congress on Tuesday evening against a backdrop of deep economic anxiety among the public, with worries spanning party, class and regional divides.

This is "breaking news?" That the media released a poll? Are bottom lines that pressed that both the Gray Lady and the Post feel it necessary to spam their readers on a daily basis with mundane tidbits that are most definitely not breaking news? These e-mails get sent almost daily, and this is only the worst infraction, but certainly not the only one.

As an online professional, I'd say that these e-mails break all the rules and break trust with readers, enticing people to click on the presumption that something extraordinary has happened -- maybe a fighting has unexpectedly broken out somewhere, or a notable historic figure has died. Instead, it's just more puffery from news outlets who, having failed to sell real newspapers or enlightening content to their readers, resort to hawking t-shirts and commemorative plaques of the November 5 and January 21st editions. 

Today, the Washington Post decided it was time to re-examine the health of John McCain

Questions Linger About McCain's Prognosis After Skin Cancer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/17/AR2008101702825.html

Evidently eight years of good health and the release of 1,173 pages of medical records to reporters is insufficient disclosure to the truther community on the Left, who are sure McCain is liable to have a relapse.

The cancer truthers claim is melanona has a reoccurance rate of 56%. I'm not an oncologist, but I am a lawyer. Which means that one needs to weigh the evidence both parties bring to the table.

What is the relapse rate for cocaine abuse? 

In the book, Obama acknowledges that he used cocaine as a high school student but rejected heroin. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though," he says. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/02/AR2007010201359_pf.html 

The medical records released by Senator Obama offer no insight into this issue; perhaps as they total a single page from one physician

Far from the hundreds of pages of medical records provided to the McCain press corps for several hours, Barack Obama’s campaign released a note from his doctor that deemed him in “excellent health.”

http://embeds.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/05/29/obama-camp-releases-doctors-report/

I'm not sure the left is doing their candidate any service by raising the issue of adequacy of medical records. Frankly, I'm surprised the McCain camp hasn;t been badgering Obama over this. Well, here's another thing a lawyer picks up along the way...you notice what isn't being said as well as what is being said.

Anyone remember this little controversy?  

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/03/bush.dui/

Strange things can come to light in the last week of a campaign.

Who knows, unless we really turn out a vote in Ohio Jennifer Brunner may have to bone up on her Katherine Harris imitation 

The Washington Post's front pager about Sarah Palin's per diem expenditure for her upkeep as Governor of Alaska demonstrates one of the Left-Wing news media's (especially print media) most disingenuous and corrupt practices - the use of newspaper headlines (and often, ledes) as a sort of push-poll mechanism against political foes.

If any set of people should know the power of words to convey deeper meanings than the mere literal, it is headline writers and the editors that sign off on them. More than anyone else, these people know that the bulk of the public does not do more than glance at the headlines on the front page and if time permits, read the lede paragraph of what they find interesting and shuffle on to the counter, leaving the newspaper still on the rack.

I believe it is with this knowledge that everyone involved with the production of this rather unremarkable article (except for the fact that Palin's expenditures are 20% that of her predecessor's) about a public official's entirely reasonable, legal, above-board and quite frankly frugal public expenditures somehow managed to get it on the Washington Post's front page under this particular headline:
"Palin Billed State for Nights Spent at Home"

One of Jonah Goldberg's readers asks; why wasn't the headline the far less eyebrow raising "Sarah Palin Followed Alaska's Per Diem Policy"?

Simple. Because the former allows the WaPo to strongly imply a breach of ethics on the part of Sarah Palin - the only reason such an article detailing absolutely no such breach or questionable act would earn a spot on the front page. The headline and its placement has no other purpose than to capitalize on the ignorance of the average American voter seeing the headline at the supermarket in favor of the Obama/Biden ticket.

Of course, every single editor and newsroom writer at the WaPo would argue that the headline is entirely accurate and point to the content of the article itself (fair enough in itself) as proof that they had no intention of suggesting that Sarah Palin was collecting money she should not have. They would, of course, claim that they can see no way in which any casual headline browser would see the headline and not automatically assume Sarah Palin was bilking Alaskan taxpayers of the nightly cost of a suite at the Ritz while she was sleeping at her own home.

They would also be lying. It's an old, dirty and malicious trick, they know it and when it comes to politicians they like (or worship - as they certainly do Obama) they're very careful to craft headlines and ledes that don't lead the casual headline skimmer to take away something negative about their subject.

Imagine a newspaper printing a story about a politician with a headline saying "Congressman Slept With Seventeen Year Old High School Student" and right there above the fold, on the front page, is a picture of the 41 year old Congressman side by side with the year book picture of a pretty high school sophomore smiling innocently at the camera.

Imagine, upon reading the article, you discover that the year book photo was from 23 years ago ... meaning that the congressman slept with the 17 year old school girl when he was 18. Would you believe any editor or writer at that newspaper who tries to convince you that there was no malice involved in choosing that particular headline and placing it on the front page - on account of the fact that the headline is literally true?

The scenario may be a bit too stark, but it is the exact same deal here. The only difference is in degree.