Whitewashing the Media of the 1990s

by: Matt Stoller

Mon Apr 28, 2008 at 12:23


Chuck Todd:

"It's fascinating: Nobody's been a bigger victim of the so-called YouTube moments than Bill Clinton," Todd said. "I think Bill Clinton was woefully unprepared for 21st Century media."

Although Clinton caught a glimpse of the digital future when he was president and a little-known Internet gadfly named Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, he was never subjected to the kind of unblinking scrutiny of today's media environment.

Ah, remember the 1990s, those glorious days when Clinton could speak unmolested by a restrained media environment.  It's not like ABC News producers were pretty much advising the Starr investigators, that accusations that Clinton was a murderer were regularly thrown around with impunity, or that advisors of Clinton were accused of domestic violence with no evidence by Matt Drudge.

Bill Clinton is hated by the media in DC, he always has been.  By pretending like this is new, like Clinton is just unprepared for technology, Todd exculpates his industry's role in 1990s and 2000s of undermining democracy through dramatic bouts of misinformation culminating of course in the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the remarkable deception around the war.

John McCain gets basically no scrutiny, Obama and Hillary are subjected to immense amounts of it.  None of this justifies Bill, Hillary, or Obama's behavior, such as it is, but it is useful to notice how technological changes somehow allow people like Chuck Todd to maintain the illusion of their own lack of agency in politics.
Matt Stoller :: Whitewashing the Media of the 1990s

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Whitewashing the Media of the 1990s | 10 comments
Very Clever of Todd (0.00 / 0)
He uses YouTube as a surrogate to attack Bill who serves as a surrogate to attack Hillary.

But then so have Obama supporters been using Bill as surrogate to attack Hillary. So I guess Obama supporters would be approve of Todd's tactics.

Last I checked Bill isn't running for President anymore than Michelle Obama is running for President.  

thanks (4.00 / 1)
Thanks for calling Todd out on this and reminding everyone of the minutes of the last meeting.
Cmon! Give the networks a break! (4.00 / 1)
They're just trying to stay in the business of picking our nominees/presidents for us! Like Jack Welch in 2000!  
Democrats Share The Blame (0.00 / 0)
I completely agree that the media is Republican territory. The question is why, and the answer goes beyond media bias.

The Republicans have spent a lot of time analyzing the media. They've learned how to send coded messages in the subtext, and to coordinate and spoon-feed information to "news" operations that are desperately understaffed.

Democrats act as if nothing has changed in the last 30 years. They crank out long, complicated arguments best suited for print, and then try to present them in a sound-bite TV medium that is ill-suited for stemwinding. They go in a million different directions, and think it's cute or noble to do so.

As partisan as I am, and as much of a Democratic believer as I am, I look at the Democratic Party and its candidates and its surrogates and think that there's no small amount of poetic justice going on. Stupidity and arrogance is a terrible combination, but those two words aptly describe the Democratic Party's approach to the media for several decades now.

Anyone who thinks they're going to roll over because we're pissed off is a fool. The Democratic Party needs to get its act together with respect to the media, but as of yet I see no sign that this is even beginning to happen.

I'd add (0.00 / 0)
that the Right has been pounding hard on the media as being "too liberal" since the 1960s. Which is just brutally working the refs, since  "Liberal Media" may have been an appropriate moniker loooong ago, when people got their news from big-city newspapers where the reporters were blue-collar guys and their reformer -minded editors may have leaned a little lib.

Nowadays most people get their news from mega-corps, not conservative by nature, delivered by anchors and pundits who make huge salaries, and we all know money changes everything...

[ Parent ]
I don't completely see it that way (0.00 / 0)
While I agree that there were huge amounts of hostile media attention on the Clintons in the 90s, and that McCain gets a free ride as compared to the Clintons or Obama, I think that misses the point of Todd's article.  There's a lot to be said for an argument that the combination of information diffusion through blogospheres, ability to spread video snippets around via YouTube, and application of technologies like social network sites and wikis, have significantly changed what you can and can't get away with in the last eight years.  There's a really interesting chapter on this in Matt Bai's The Argument.  And in 2008, I think the black blogosphere and ClintonAttacksObmaa wiki did a lot to highlight the pattern of racially charged rhetoric the Clinton campaign was using in January, and that in turn contributed to their precipitous fall-off in support in the black community.  Back in the 1990s, there wasn't an equivalent grassroots mechanism.

But in 2008, Clinton's gaffes -- calling Obama's opposition to the Iraq war a "fairy tale," inviting charges of race-baiting by comparing Obama's campaign to Jesse Jackson's, reviving his wife's Bosnia trip for another spin in the news cycle -- sparked immediate blowback that seems to have caught him by surprise.

He certainly has seemed repeatedly surprised -- and irritated.    

About that "race-baiting" (0.00 / 0)
I thought the "fairy tale" remark was about how early Obama's Presidential ambitions were formed, not his position on Iraq.

And I seem to recall reading somewhere (sorry to be so vague) that Bill Clinton's statements comparing Obama to Jackson were made in response to a question about Jackson and that all the video clips have been edited so that the question is not seen.

I'm not having much luck with google.  Does anyone have more information about these things?  

[ Parent ]
Re: About that "race-baiting" (0.00 / 0)
Links here, along with context for the overall pattern.
[ Parent ]
Oh wait ... (0.00 / 0)
Ooops.  The link for the fairy tale remark isn't there after all.  THe perils of wikis.  [Note to self: next time, double-check before posting.]

In any case, you're reinforcing the point I'm trying to make above: with video splicing, the "fairy tale" remark and comparison to Jesse can be more effectively decontextualized and then tied to the overall pattern  Bill's been surprised by this and reacted really badly a couple of times, painting himself as a victim ("what happened in SC was a mugging!"), going off on a reporter who questioned him about this ("nobody wants to talk about that!"), etc.

By contrast, Obama doesn't appear to have been particularly surprised by Bittergate, or the excerpts from the Wright videos, etc. etc.   I'm certainly not arguing that he reacted perfectly by any means; just that it seems like the campaign anticipates it a lot more, and that their responses are more tailored to a web 2.0 world.

[ Parent ]
Fixed now (0.00 / 0)
The power of wikis!  :-)

"Fairy tale" is at #11.  Jesse is #35 (and #44, from Harold Ickes).  "not one single solitary citizen has asked me about this" (a particularly good example of something that was clearly going to look horrible on YouTube) is #36.  Myth and mugging is #46.

jon

[ Parent ]
Whitewashing the Media of the 1990s | 10 comments
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