Howard Fineman‘s latest Newsweek piece highlights a trend that disturbs him: candidates who are unwilling to play ball with traditional media outlets.
Fineman specifically targets Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul’s refusal on one occasion to chat with a Louisville Courier-Journal reporter and a reporter from an “innovative news channel on the state’s largest cable system.”
Time was, no candidate in Kentucky, not even a libertarian Republican,
would stiff the man from The C-J. But these are different times,
especially for unorthodox candidates like Paul.…
What?s going on? The Republicans have some especially weird, prickly,
and novice candidates this year. Their Washington handlers?their proxies
to the press?admit that they have to silence the candidates, then train
them before turning them loose. But there are deeper, more disturbing
explanations. Changes to the media landscape?ideological fragmentation,
the decline of newspapers, the rise of a feisty-but-still-atomized
Web-based, digital press?have long since allowed candidates to pick whom
they respond to, if anyone. And more and more, candidates construct
their own faux-media entities, complete with video-streamed ?reports?
and Facebook outreach. (Ironically, they?re just adapting techniques
that the president mastered during his 2008 campaign; no one has
replicated them to greater effect, perhaps, than Sarah Palin. Witness
her recent missives about her new neighbor, investigative reporter Joe
McGinniss.)
Fineman suggests this type of strategy could come back to hurt Paul and others.
All candidates have views they?re obscuring, or personal stories they?re
not disclosing, that will seep out one way or another, and they?ll need
a neutral forum to explain themselves.
And this is where Fineman’s argument breaks down. He seems to suggest that the Courier-Journal and other traditional media outlets offer a “neutral forum.”
Regular readers of the Media Mangle will recognize how far short of the mark that suggestion falls.
