Big Media spin turns candidate harasser story into something else
After reading several accounts of the guy harassing Obama for a photograph, it seems pretty apparent that Washngton Post’s Shailagh Murray at The Trail campaign blog was the only big media journalist to describe the multiple encounters correctly. Read it and check the video, to see what actually transpired.
Now look at the same event through the different spin Maria Gavrilovic of CBS News put on it. The report wasn’t so bad, but the title of Obama Has Testy Exchange In Philadelphia turned it into a statement about Obama’s temperament, which was restrained in the face of an obnoxious profiteer.
Ben Smith of Politico reported on the reports from others and was fairly neutral, too. But his title was Scenes from the pool report: ‘I won’t be smiling’, which also gave it a negative candidate spin, particularly if a reader read the title and skipped most of the story.
Slow News Day? That’s still no reason to add spin to an event of no consequence. The encounter really wasn’t newsworthy at all and two of the three provided deceptive titles to make it sound like something to judge Obama by.
If the media can’t find more to write about than that, they should have at least titled and reported it honestly : Annoying Man Annoys Presidential Candidate: is granted a photo op anyway then fails to take picture.
I see better journalim in high school than CBS News and Politico provided.
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:29 am
This is an old Reaganesque thing of watching the news with sound off. I remember a review of a half dozen or so “scathing” news pieces that if you turn off the sound they looked like Reagan campaign ads. The press didn’t get.
The words are transitory, but the images live on.