8-28-08, 11:43 am
The corporate media got caught this week carrying water for the McCain campaign. According to ABC News, media pundits, talk shows, and 'news' shows have given free coverage to McCain campaign videos that the campaign falsely billed as TV ads criticizing Barack Obama.
Those 'journalists' then played those videos on TV in an endless loop accompanied by banal discussions about their content. No serious fact-checking took place, ABC News reports, let alone an investigation into whether the McCain campaign was actually paying TV stations to play them as commercials.
According to ABC News, 'There's been evidence emerging that McCain's campaign isn't really running these ads anywhere.'
In other words, instead of scrutinizing and trying to determine the facts about McCain's claims, the corporate media have simply taken his campaign's word and provided free and generally uncritical coverage.
The corporate media have sunk to a new low. Some will call it a symptom of right-wing media bias against Obama; others will say this development is a result of laziness and shoddy journalism on the part of the corporate media. Perhaps both. And this favorable and free media coverage is the source of McCain's position polls, not the effectiveness of his campaign, the quality of his ideas, or his appeal to voters.
According to media watchdogs, three McCain videos fall into this category. One was a video that purported to show a former Clinton convention delegate now endorsing John McCain. While the whole corporate media were a-buzz about it, giving the McCain campaign a whole lot of free publicity and positive punditry, the video played only in a single market in Ohio.
A cheap knock-off of Hillary Clinton's '3 am' ad also got a lot of attention, with reporters failing to remind their readers and viewers that the Clinton campaign's second '3 am' was a sharp and accurate criticism of McCain's foreign policy.
Now a new video from the McCain campaign, titled 'Tiny,' is getting a lot of attention. Though the video misrepresents and makes false claims about Barack Obama's positions on Iran – and again it doesn't appear that the McCain campaign has actually paid to have the video air as a TV commercial – the corporate media is replaying the ad with customary McCain campaign talking points as part of their 'unbiased' discussion.
These irresponsible actions by the media undermine American voters' belief in what they see on TV, hear on the radio, or read in print. Indeed, they undermine the concept of a free press, let alone thoughtful and meaningful political discourse. As Eric Alterman notes in a recent blog post for The Nation, Obama and the Democrats are not just up against sleazy Republican tactics, they're up against the corporate media as well.
--Reach Joel Wendland at
