...and that gift is the profile that they did of her last week.
Like the profiles of Bachmann that have appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune over the years, it establishes her as nothing more a spunky if controversial maverick conservative. That's exactly the kind of national coverage that an aspiring Republican conservative candidate has wet dreams about. (Link below.)
Tim Pawlenty can only dream about getting the kind of intro to Time readers that Bachmann gets here: Time describes a convention of Iowa conservatives had been lulled to sleep by speaker after speaker before Bachmann arrived on stage--instantly bringing the torpid crowd to their feet, cheering her like the crowd greeting Tom Cruise on the Oprah Winfrey show.
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There's no reason to doubt that account, none at all. It's not even news--everywhere Bachmann has gone for the past few years, her presence has brought rank-and-file conservatives to their feet. She get an enthusiastic reception from both Republicans who joined the tea party and Republicans who resent the tea party. (The second group applauds her publicly because they know that Bachmann and the particular conservative faction she represents can wreck Republican chances in the next election cycle. They're scare of her and of the evangelical conservative hierarchy she works for.)
And Time magazine? Well, in case you didn't know, it's always been a kind of "house organ" for the Republican Party, ever since Henry Luce founded it back in the twenties. It remains the most influential American news weekly in a media environment where there is no longer any real need for right leaning news analysis (you can get quite enough of that for free, elsewhere.) And Time sticks around even though there's really no longer any need for a weekly news roundup in the form of a magazine. (Most of us who follow politics make our own "new magazine" out of the articles printed online by newswire service or online journals that we've found to be trustworthy. Why would people under fifty continue to consult Time--which has dumbed itself down to the breathless level of Tiger Beat, and regularly slants its news to the right--but not far enough to the right to "own" the Fox market share?)
Nonetheless, Time staggers on--and its take on a given subject influences voters and other journalists (especially older voters and lazy journalists.) It's no longer true that Time can make or break conservative careers the way Fox or Limbaugh can...but Time has respectability and "brand" and an undeserved degree of respect. What Time reports about a political candidate, becomes "of record" in the databases.
So its treatment of Bachmann is a gift to her campaign and its prospects. It's about as critical of Bachmann's integrity as a Fox News piece or a Bachmann profile in an evangelical conservative publication. For example, look at how they treat Bachmann's trash talk:
TIME: In the past, she has joked inaccurately about the "coincidence" that swine flu emerged during the Carter and Obama presidencies...
(Nah, that wasn't a "joke," when she said that. If memory serves, there's video of her suggesting to a broadcast audience that she believed there actually was some connection between Democratic administrations and swine flu outbreaks. That was not presented to that audience as a joke. That was a comment she made in the course of a serious interview with "PajamasTV", a right wing broadcast outlet, about the dangers of a swine flu outbreak.
http://www.youtube.com/...
So it's "lying spin" rather than "news reporting" to rewrite history and tell Time readers that the "swine flu comment" was nothing more than a joke. It's a lie, for this reporter to tell this audience--that that particular comment was "a joke.")
There is of course a ton of stuff like "the swine flu conspiracy" that the Time reporter would have turned up in researching a magazine profile of Bachmann. It's not there, in the profile. The fact that she public accused Barack Obama of being a "tyrant," that she was cited as a source of hate rhetoric by the Southern Poverty Law Center...naaah, that would make her look like some kind of nut, if they ran all that stuff...
The stuff they do run could have been cut-and-pasted from any of the sweetheart profiles of her done by the Minnesota press over the years. They too, have some kind of weird interest in keeping the "she really is a nut" stuff from their readers.
What about the other stuff that's not in the Time profile: the stuff that's so, so important to readers considering a Bachmann candidacy? One mention, only two words, just a drive-by...of Bachmann's relationship to the Christian right (they quote a flak say that she's a "social conservative.") First: most of Time's readers don't know that social conservative is a euphemism for "protege of the Christian right." In the second place, reducing Bachmann's relationship with the national Christian right to a two word drive-by mention in a quote: indicates that Time actively wants to conceal Bachmann's relationship with the religious right from its readers. (And that relationship, for this person, is umbilical, is "air supply," is more than a decade old, is an essential feature of this politician's agenda and politics.)
So Time simply leaves that out, leaves that "most important political agenda" thing out of their general introduction to a candidate with support for a White House bid?
Alrighty then...What about..."the lying?" The lying, which is neither "of the left or of the right," but is a verified and documented feature of Bachmann's political style.
It's an established fact. It's been commented on in national media, regularly. Politifact has documented her reliance on lying as matter of policy. Her reliance on lying as way conducting politics was even noted here in Minnesota reporting for the first time, earlier this year.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/...
But Time, and its editors and reporter, have chosen not to report "the lying thing" to their older, mainstream America audience. So for that audience, relying on Time for their info about the world: "Michele Bachmann is not a liar. That wasn't in the Time profile, and Time would have mentioned that if it was a well-established fact--so it must be mere partisan propaganda when other people claim that she's a liar."
Thus: what you've got here is essentially a piece of Bachmann spin, presented as journalism but designed to enhance her credibility and political prospects by leaving out key features of career. (Objections that putting in all the facts would have made the report unwieldy don't apply here. You don't have to put all the facts into an introductory profile, just the most important ones. And surely--if the concern is reporting the most important truths to the readers--the fact that Bachmann embraces lying and conspiracy theory as a matter of political policy, is more important than any of the facts reported in this Time profile.)
What Time has done here is actually political propaganda on behalf a particular candidate. (You know...like Fox does.)
http://www.time.com/...