NY Mag: The Meme Prisoner

[babylonsister]

The Meme Prisoner
In the press, Hillary has been trapped by her own story, whereas Obama has been freed by his.


The day after the notably down-and-dirty Nevada caucuses, I asked Hillary Clinton if, on occasion, her campaign had been wont to play the game a tad too rough. Now and then, Clinton allowed—then quickly pivoted and trained her fire on Barack Obama’s operation. She argued that his campaign had incited racial animus by playing up her remarks about Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King. That it had made “what I thought was a breathtaking charge that I was in some way responsible for Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.” That it had “basically condoned a really mean-spirited” Spanish-language ad in Nevada that asserted Hillary “does not respect our people.” Without pausing to catch her breath, Clinton concluded, “There’s no outcry. There’s no drumbeat. And so I accept that I will always be under a higher level of scrutiny; it goes with the territory.”

The scrutiny Clinton was talking about was media scrutiny, of course. So I asked if she agreed with her husband’s loudly voiced view that there was a double standard inherent in the coverage of her and Obama. “I don’t go there,” she replied, waving one hand in the air. “Certainly, a lot of my supporters express their feelings about it. But I just don’t think about that because it’s not a useful thing for me to think about.”

Whether Clinton is actually so Zen-like about this topic—and, really, who would be?—her adjutants are adamantly not. Instead, for the better part of a year, they have complained to any reporter who would listen about what they regard as a manifest pro-Obama, anti-Hillary tilt in the press corps. With the contretemps over David Shuster’s “pimped out” comments about Chelsea Clinton, this line of argument has become more heated, to be sure, especially as it pertains to NBC and MSNBC. (“A horror show” is how one Clinton adviser describes her nightly treatment by Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, and even Brian Williams.) But it’s connected to a long-simmering sense of grievance that’s deeper and more subtle.

That the campaign exaggerates its degree of outrage, and Hillary her victimhood, in order to gain a tactical advantage is obvious. But that doesn’t mean their critique is meritless—quite the contrary. The more interesting question, however, is what role each campaign has had in fostering a media dynamic that has clearly favored Obama and plainly damaged Clinton. And also whether that dynamic will come back to bite Obama if he’s the Democratic nominee.

It’s worth pointing out, to begin with, that the Clinton forces are hardly alone in noting the disparity. “Both of them have gotten an enormous amount of play,” says Marion Just, a political scientist at Wellesley who has made a systematic study of the coverage of the race. “But the coverage of Hillary has been primarily negative, while the coverage of Obama has been so positive that you have to call him, though I really hate this term, a media darling.”

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http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/44211/