Usually I make it a point of pride to read the entire news article before deconstructing it. But that was unnecessary in this case, involving today's WSJ piece on the secret of Bachmann's success:
AUGUST 5, 2011
Behind a GOP Contender's Iowa Surge
BY MONICA LANGLEY AND PATRICK O'CONNOR
MARION, Iowa-To understand why presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has surged in Iowa, watch when she is handed a baby. On a recent stop here, she took off her bracelet, dangled it before the infant and cradled him while he teethed on the pearls.
During another campaign appearance, Ms. Bachmann climbed down from the stage to take the hands of a woman who asked a question, holding them as she answered. Meeting a teenager with Down syndrome, the Minnesota congresswoman swept him up in a hug, then signed his T-shirt...
Didn't have to read the rest, didn't have to subscribe or pay to access it. Because the reporters who wrote that and identified it to the public as the reason that Bachmann is surging in Iowa--don't know jack s**t about Bachmann or American politics.
(CONTINUED)
And I say that without knowing anything about those reporters.
For all I know, the reporters who wrote that piece may be award-winners. They may be the two most respected reporters at the WSJ. They may have national reputations as paragons of political reporting. Maybe little journalism students go to bed every night, saying to themselves, "when I grow up, I want to be as professional and trustworthy and respected as reporters Monica Langley and Patrick O'Connor of the WSJ"--I have no clue whether or not that's the case.
But I am confident in opining that they do not know what they are talking about regarding Michele Bachmann, and did not do any significant research for this piece. I am confident in opining that they do not know what they are talking about, if they really believe (as they state in these paragraphs) that the reason that Bachmann is surging in Iowa is because she knows how to manipulate babies and television cameras to signify "loving, conservative mom" images to adoring audiences.
If their professional reporters made serious inquiries about Bachmann's career and concluded that--that's a sign that people shouldn't read the WSJ to find out what's going on anymore. (Too bad. I always found the "straight news" portion of the paper was always informative and pretty reliable.)
Michele Bachmann's career and her current surge in Iowa are results of a carefully prepared, long term political strategy that was put into motion years ago by leaders of the national Christian right. That's why she's surging in Iowa, as Mike Huckabee surged past Mitt Romney there in 2008.
So this piece is deeeeply flaaaawed, from the get-go. Identifying the secret of Bachmann's success as "that baby imagery thing" is like beginning a piece on terminal cancer with two paragraphs about how "it's not that big a deal." In each case, any reader with any level of familiarity on the subject knows that such writers don't know what they are talking about.
Even if the reporters go on to note the real reason for Bachmann's "meteoric rise" later in this piece: starting out by telling the readers that the secret of Bachmann's success is the baby thing--is misinformation verging on malfeasance.
How can I be so sure of this? Because there are millions of attractive women in the world who are capable of creating moving video imagery by being kind to people with Down's syndrome on camera--but they are not surging in Iowa these days. And there are hundreds of women politicians in America who could create equally moving video imagery of Dickensian Christmas charm by dangling their keys or pearls in front of a cute baby. But they are not surging in Iowa. Doing the standard "baby pictures with the candidate" stuff is not going to cause those female candidates to surpass their rivals.
Ergo, there must be some other reason that Bachmann's positioned in conservative evangelical Iowa and other candidates aren't--right? Iowa: the place where (in 2008) conservative evangelical candidate Mike Huckabee beat conservative Mormon candidate Mitt Romney by seven points in the GOP primary. Despite the fact that Huckabee had no money and Romney had all the money. There's a clue, for WSJ reporters who want to know why this conservative evangelical candidate is surging in Iowa this year, and why Mormon Romney didn't even bother to spend a dime there this time around.
The reporters/editors who ran this one seem to have made the mistake made by Minnesota political reporters and other low-information voters who followed Bachmann's career--the mistake of thinking that "what they were presented with, visually, by Bachmann and her campaign" was "all there was to the story." People who do such reporting credit themselves with truly remarkable powers of judgment, believing that what they see (designed by the politician specifically for the consumption of the media and the low-information voters) is "all that is relevant"...
Such reporters pass this carefully crafted political imagery along to the public--"as if it were" their own "news revelation" of some basic, undeniable truth! (For another example, seen professional media insistence on describing Bachmann as a "fiscal conservative" despite her regular and documented attempts to get tens of millions of deficit dollar taxpayer funds delivered to her district in the form of earmarks. Doesn't matter to the media: Bachmann tells the papers she's a "fiscal conservative"--so that's how they describe her to their readers.)
All this assumes, of course, that this "baby kissing/compassion" story was a sincere attempt at political analysis by the WSJ. If the WSJ intended it as a mere "puff piece," free political advertising for Michele Bachmann--then it's a great job!
Partial link:
http://online.wsj.com/...