Politico editors John Harris and Jim VandeHei see a pattern, and they don’t like it one bit.
All those Obama flacks in the media are piling on ABC News’ Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos for the anchors’ performance in last week’s Democratic debate.
My, oh my, but weren’t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week’s presidential debate.Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner’s personal associations and his electability. Where was the substance? Where was the balance?
Where indeed. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining.
There are a few reasons this is an interesting argument. First of all, it relies on one dubious premise: that critics of the debate found fault only in the questions the moderators asked Obama.
Although it’s true Obama took the greater share of nonsense questions (“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”) almost all of the criticism of the debate I have read—and the criticism I have written—did not focus on Obama’s interrogation.
The problem was not that Gibson and Stephanopoulos were too hard on Obama. The problem with the “debate” was that the moderators used what should have been a public forum (ABC, after all, makes millions from the privilege of broadcasting on the public airwaves) in order to reiterate “controversies” that were created by the corporate media in order to fill broadcast time. This was done while serious questions about government were put off until the end of the debate, and even then those questions were mostly vapid and were intended, like the questions on the medley of "controversies," to throw the candidates off and force them to make mistakes.
But there’s another reason it’s interesting to see this spirited defense of ABC News in the pages of The Politico. The newspaper is a property of Allbritton Communications, whose main business is owning and operating nine ABC network affiliates.
Allbritton owns ABC affiliates in Washington, D.C.; Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Aniston, Alabama; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Little Rock, Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Lynchburg, Virginia; and Charleston, South Carolina.
Now, I've never worked for the Washington Post, so I might be wrong here, but if you are the head editor of a publication run for profit by a company whose main business interest is in the success of the ABC network, and you plan on writing a defense of ABC News, you ought to disclose who writes your paycheck.
—Douglas Carlucci
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