Media Notes: Media Whores 3, Dean 0

here's a thoughtful article on Salon about how Howard Dean's campaign has seemed to be in serious freefall ever since Iowa. But my favorite take on all of this is how the media has played in role in casting aspirations on the person who was widely regarded as the Democratic front-runner and the subsequent fallout.

You can talk plenty about strategy and all, which is definitely valid, but attempts to diagram missteps, miscues and overall strategy doesn't always explain why a candidate is left out in the cold. Ordinary (read unengaged) voters don't think about strategy: they either follow what everyone else thinks, or make decisions at the last moment based primarily on image. And the sources of that image comes screaming at a voter from every conceivable angle. Trying to sift through it all is hard -- especially when you want to know which Average Joe will be excised from the stable -- and it's even doubly so when you have competing sources vying to inform your perception of a candidate.

If Mr. Dean fails to win some primaries or in the end, doesn't get the Democratic nomination, let's hope he's taking some good notes. He can look back at all of this and figure out where his strategy needed honing, but most importantly, knowing that image and perception are what make those hordes of undecided (read uninformed) voters rely on ultimately.

I will not say that there was a media conspiracy to get Mr. Dean, but in the weeks before the Iowa caucus, you couldn't get past a news article about him wherein the phrase "unelectable" continued to surface. It was used so frequently, you'd be forgiven if you thought it was his middle name. It was a label that no one bothered to explain. There were words like "temperament" and "anger" thrown around in sloppy sentences that evoked a sense of imbalance and disharmony. And a study last month noted that compared to 79% positive coverage for the other candidates, Mr. Dean only garnered a 49% positive review rating.

And then, of course, there was Mr. Dean's Iowa exit speech. The clip of an excited Dean rallying his supporters suddenly morphed into carciature and invited ridicule among the media. It became fodder for David Letterman and Jay Leno. CNN, which likes to bill itself as the most trusted name in news, ran the clip 673 times. That's not a typo. Almost seven hundred times! And to cap it all off, ABC newsreader Diane Sawyer spent an entire interview about the subject, trying to provoke Dean and grilling Mrs. Dean. (To be fair, Ms. Sawyer belatedly owned up to that clip, noting that by examining other tapes, it was next to impossible to hear Mr. Dean over the noise, hence his hand-held microphone.)

What the real point of that interview was, I can't tell, because by this time, many peoples' perception of Dean had become cemented. Remember, people do not spend hours going over what any candidate stands for -- they're informed by what they see, and when you have a growing chorus of people asking the same question ("Is Howard Dean just too angry?"), should you really be surprised what the answer is?
To blame Mr. Dean's decent strictly on the sloppy journalism that passes for news is incorrect. But to pretend (or worse, ignore) the media's contribution in creating a candidate's image is a delusion. As far as Mr. Dean is concerned, there seemed to exist this vague sense of hostility in the media that evoked the scorn and contempt the profession allayed against Al Gore. That was Phase I. The next phase was talk about his temper and his (undefined) electability. The nail in the coffin? Mr. Dean's Iowa speech. Media whores 3, Howard Dean 0.

Think about it for a second by taking a look at John Kerry. Well before the Iowa he was written off and routinely ignored. Yet he triumphed in Iowa, New Hampshire and is looking to win big in the Super Tuesday votes. What did he do that was so radically different between November and January that could result in such a stunning turnaround? Nothing. Nothing at all. But here he is, placing first in this primary and that caucus and surging ahead his competitors.

It's all about image. Perhaps these subtle messages about Dean scared enough voters away from him to vote for Kerry, whom Democrats see as the best chance to defeat Bush. Since it's unlikely everyone voting in the primaries and caucuses had made up their minds long before stepping into the booth or whatever, it could very well be that Mr. Dean's media image was too iffy, hence a candidate with presidential hair. In any case, pay attention to the verbal cues the media dishes out: you just might change your mind because of it.