Who won the election? Not the Democrats, apparently.


Earlier this evening I had the privilege of participating in a journalism class that Greg Stone is teaching at Avery Point.

We covered a wide range of topics, on some of which I was able to speak intelligently, though at times I became totally inarticulate. Sometimes, you can suffer from information overload. You have so much to say on a given topic that it all tries to come out at once and you end up sounding like an idiot. Well, that's the spin I'm putting on it, though some would say you sound like what you are.

Anyway, one topic that came up was the alleged existence of liberal media bias. Where did this meme come from and how does it manage to survive, in the face of the existence of Fox, et. al? It's a subject to which it would be hard to do justice in an hour, much less off the top of your head in five minutes. I tried to argue that whatever the individual political beliefs of media members might be, collectively they have been bullied by right wing claims of bias into overcompensating by giving prominence to right wing viewpoints. (That sentence, by the way, is much more coherent than anything I actually said during the class) One point I didn't bring up was the almost reflexive way in which the media spins events in a pro-Republican way. At this point, they are not even conscious they're doing it, at least not all the time.

Two recent examples. Media Matters compares and contrasts the Time cover stories on the Republican sweep in 1994 to the Democratic takeover this year:

The Nov. 21, 1994, edition of Time magazine—published following that year’s congressional elections, in which Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives and the Senate—featured the headline “GOP Stampede: A Special Report” on the cover, and featured a graphic of an elephant trampling a donkey.

The Nov. 20 edition of Time—published following the 2006 congressional elections, in which Democrats gained control of the House and the Senate—features the headline “Special Report: The Midterms,” and features as the cover story “Why the center is the new place to be,” by columnist Joe Klein, with a graphic of a Venn diagram.

But Newsweek does Time one better. I bet you didn't know that George Bush's father (you remember him, he didn't like broccoli) was the real winner of the mid term elections:

Newsweek is the latest major media outlet to repeat the falsehood that the 2006 election was an endorsement of conservatism. The latest Newsweek cover story notes:

The American people, as politicians like to say, spoke last week - and spoke in no uncertain terms. The 2006 vote does not suggest an eagerness for a sharp left turn. It seems, rather, to be a plea for a shift from the hard right of the neoconservatives to the center represented by the old man in Houston [President George H. W. Bush].

So you see, the voters weren't voting for Democrats; they were trying to vote for non-existent centrist Republicans but merely had to settle for Democrats. Had they had the chance to vote for George's father, they would have jumped on it. This by the way is vaguely reminiscent of the almost evidence free values argument they pushed after the 2004 election. That had no empirical validity either.

One must wonder, what the Democrats must do to be considered the winners of an election? Obviously taking over both houses of Congress and winning elections in states like Montana, Missouri and Virginia was not enough. Maybe if we won after singing the Internationale before every campaign event we would get credit for winning, rather than being the guys left standing after Republicans lose.

I should add here that I'm not unaware that elections are complicated things. It certainly is the case that lots of things contributed to the election results. The point here is that the media appears to have settled on the most pro-Republican interpretation that can be applied to this election with anything approaching a straight face.

Posted: Monday - November 13, 2006 at 09:21 PM          

©