Spanking The Chairman by Paul Waldman

[Douglas Carpenter]

"The Washington journalistic establishment just doesn’t like Howard Dean. He’s rough around the edges, and he doesn’t play by the rules, especially the rule casting Democrats as perennially weak and apologetic . And reporters didn’t have to look too hard to find Democrats who would go on record about their displeasure with Dean.

Democratic politicians sometimes seem so ignorant about how the news media work, one wonders how they ever got elected in the first place. Here’s a tip: If you want reporters to write about all the things the Bush administration is doing wrong, don’t criticize your party chair to them. Lots of Washington Democrats don’t like Dean much either, but there are plenty of people to whom they can air their complaints—their staffs, their colleagues, their spouses, their dogs. Heck, they can walk over to DNC headquarters and wring his neck if they like. But when they criticize him to reporters, that enables those reporters to write one of their favorite stories, “Democrats are squabbling again.” If the politicians didn’t give those quotes, they wouldn’t be able to write those stories. Then they’d have to focus on something more advantageous to Democrats, like Bush’s failure on Iraq, or his failure on Social Security or his failure on the economy."

full article here:

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050614/spanking_the_chairman.php