This diary is a brief rant about NPR's Morning Edition has been with respect to its coverage of the Democratic nomination race.
I first really started to notice it in February, when ME's only Monday morning story following the previous weekend's Obama sweep of Washington, Nebraska, and Louisiana was a misleading one about racial polarization in the primaries. This was during pledge drive week, so I made my private pledge to redirect my public radio dollars to the local college station instead this year (WNHU, if you're keeping track).
And then there's been Cokie Robert's weekly segment -- cast as a "take on politics", but really strictly from a Washington Insider perspective that has failed to grasp the essence of Obama campaign from the start or throughout.
But this morning's show took the proverbial cake. Click here to listen. Details and my take on it after the jump.
First and most egregious was their obligatory "bittergate" story. Their take on it was that Obama has been struggling to atone for his "gaffe", and that the best he could do was to joke about reporters being bitter for having to work on a weekend. (NPR reporters were themselves too lazy to incorporate any mention of Obama's speeches addressing the "issue" over the weekend.) But the capper was that they finished the story by reading, verbatim, Hillary Clinton's fundraising appeal.
That's right: they finished the story by reading, verbatim, Hillary Clinton's fundraising appeal. In other words, they broadcast, word-for-word, to millions of people not on the Clinton e-mail list to hear, exactly what Clinton thought was most the most likely way to get would-be contributors to give money to her campaign.
(Just from an administrative standpoint, I wonder how the Clinton campaign should file that with the FEC?)
Ok -- so the story NPR may have been trying to convey was that the Clinton campaign saw in this a money-raising opportunity rather than a real point of difference to be debated between the candidates. But they could have just mentioned that the Clinton response was to craft a fund-raising email out of it, rather than REPEATING HER FUNDRAISING PLEA IN HER OWN FREAKIN' WORDS.
And, ok, my reaction to hearing the appeal (did I mention that NPR read it verbatim from the Clinton e-mail?) was something along the lines of "jeez, the reliance on this kind of type of disingenuous, spin-based bullspit is exactly the reason why her campaign is losing so badly." But I'm the first to admit I'm overexposed to the campaign, and I wonder if people paying a healthier level of attention to it would feel the same? Presumably the Clinton campaign, which crafted the e-mail -- which, in case you missed it, was then read on the air, verbatim -- thought that it would have a different effect on others.
Later in the morning, it struck me that it was never like this when Bob Edwards was around. The trigger for this insight may have been a short piece segue-ing into a story about the Pope's visit in which Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep, reading off copy written -- presumably -- by a fourth-grader, described a White House event honoring Jefferson's birthday (He lived in the White House! He had slaves! He wrote "All men are created equal"! He met foreign dignitaries in his bathrobe! (actually, that last one was from Bush himself -- apologies to all fourth graders)). It was exactly what I imagined "Fox & Friends" would sound like (having never actually seen it, beyond an occasional You-Tube blip).
That's all for my rant. But if you feel at all the same way, let me sign off with a link: to the
contact page for NPR and its programs.