One of the more interesting tidbits of campaign news this week was a Pew Research poll which found that 48 percent of voters reported are suffering from “Obama Fatigue” — that is, they feel that they have been hearing too much about the presidential candidate. By contrast, 38 percent of voters felt they have been hearing too little about John McCain.
While that’s an interesting finding, Pew didn’t bother to ask the logical follow-up questions — is what voters are hearing about Obama substantive, necessarily critical, or even relevant? Is it really that voters are hearing too much about Obama or are they not hearing enough of the right things?
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Given that just a few weeks ago, a
Rasmussen poll reported there’s a “Belief Growing That Reporters are Trying to Help Obama Win,” this would seem to be an important distinction. Forty-nine percent of voters felt the press was pro-Obama. Only 14 percent felt that the press was pro-McCain, a candidate so used to favorable coverage he jokingly referred to the media as “my base.” Even Democratic respondents to the poll thought the press was favoring Obama over McCain in greater numbers.
When almost half the electorate thinks the media is in the tank for one candidate, any story that doesn’t evaluate that candidate critically probably qualifies as “too much” in the literal and figurative sense of the phrase.
The ensuing consternation of the pundit classes about this disconnect between the voters and the media only worsens the problem. After poring over a
New York Times story about Obama’s time as a professor at the University of Chicago, the
Washington Post columnist
Ruth Marcus wrote that the story was “a reminder of Obama’s essential elusiveness, and how little we understand about how the candidate himself would resolve these thorny problems.”
Just for a second, imagine you’re Ruth Marcus: You’ve just read a
New York Times story that essentially concludes that Professor Obama traded on his popularity with students while he remained totally unengaged with his colleagues and walked way from his time at the university without a significant piece of scholarship to his name. (It’s almost like a metaphor or something.) When faced with such an unflattering portrait of a leading presidential candidate this late in the game, as a news person, do you a) belie your total indifference to your information-gathering role and churn out a column about how “elusive” Obama is, to no great insight? Or do you b) leave the cozy cocoon of the editorial department and walk down the hall to the once revered news desk of the
Washington Freakin’ Post and demand to know why it is that, three months away from an election, they have reported so little about the frontrunner that no one can say who he is?
Evidence that can provide insight into who Obama is as a politician and thinker certainly exists, but far too few journalists seem interested in looking for it, much less in reporting on it.
Just a few days before Marcus’ bloviations, columnist
Richard Cohen graced the
Post’s pages and concluded “I know that Barack Obama is a near-perfect political package. I’m still not sure, though, what’s in it.” To his credit, Cohen offered a more pointed comparison of the records of the two major candidates than Marcus’ punchless inquiry. In sharp contrast with Obama, Cohen says he “could cite four or five actions — not speeches — that John McCain has taken that elicit my admiration, even my awe.”
