So now the press tells candidates when to quit?

[DeepModem Mom]

Media Matters for America: So now the press tells candidates when to quit?
by Eric Boehlert

History continues to unfold on many levels as the protracted Democratic Party primary race marches on, featuring the first woman and the first African-American with a real shot at winning the White House. Here's another first: the press's unique push to get a competitive White House hopeful to drop out of the race. It's unprecedented. Looking back through modern U.S. campaigns, there's simply no media model for so many members of the press to try to drive a competitive candidate from the field while the primary season is still unfolding.

Until this election cycle, journalists simply did not consider it to be their job to tell a contender when he or she should stop campaigning. That was always dictated by how much money the campaign still had in the bank, how many votes the candidate was still getting, and what very senior members of the candidate's own party were advising. In this case, Howard Dean, the head of the Democratic National Committee, said he was "dumbfounded" by public demands for Clinton to drop out last month. (He now wants one of the candidates to quit after the final June 3 primary.) Yet lots of pundits have suggested that in a neck-and-neck campaign in which neither candidate will likely secure the nomination based on pledged delegates, Sen. Hillary Clinton must drop out before all the states have had a chance to vote.

I realize the political debate surrounding the extended Democratic campaign remains a hot one, with people holding passionate opinions about the delegate math involved and what the consequences for the Democratic Party could be. I'm not weighing in on that debate. I'm focusing on how journalists have behaved during this campaign. And the fact is, the media's get-out-now push is unparalleled. Strong second-place candidates such as Ronald Reagan (1976), Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and Jerry Brown, all of whom campaigned through the entire primary season, and most of whom took their fights all the way to their party's nominating conventions, were never tagged by the press and told to go home.

"Clinton is being held to a different standard than virtually any other candidate in history," wrote Steven Stark in the Boston Phoenix. "When Clinton is simply doing what everyone else has always done, she's constantly attacked as an obsessed and crazed egomaniac, bent on self-aggrandizement at the expense of her party." Indeed, even after Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary convincingly last week, she awoke the next morning to read an angry New York Times editorial, "beseeching her to get the hell out of the race," as Howard Kurtz put it at washingtonpost.com....

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With Clinton...the press seems to have almost complete disregard for the 14 million voters who have backed her candidacy, as well as the idea that she is their representative in this race. Instead, they treat her entire campaign as some sort of vanity exercise in which voters do not exist....

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That new media standard has been created exclusively for Hillary Clinton....

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200804300001

[tekisui]

1. SHe has every right to stay in and choose when she

accepts defeat. The media isn't fair to anyone, it's just part of the deal.

[MADem]

2. Clinton is being held to a different standard than virtually any other candidate in history

She sure is.

And even DEMOCRATS are guilty of piling on and playing those foolish games.

[Bumblebee]

6. She sure is -- and KO is in the front again. He just declared that Obama

already has all the delegates, that Clinton is running out of gas, etc, etc -- all that while she is undoubtedly surging in the polls and doing MUCH better against McCain in GE matchups in several polls in a row... But who cares...

[MADem]

7. Pay no attention to that overweight old man chasing a young and profoundly untalented girl.

No one does anymore. He's waddled over the shark. His ratings are tanking like his credibility.

He's got Morton Downey Junior-itis, he made the mistake of believing his own publicity.

[Bumblebee]

8. Kinda sad since he was quite entertaining and worth watching before.

I stopped watching him as soon as he started attacking Hillary but made a mistake of keeping the TV on after Abrams tonight...

[MADem]

9. It it sad, but it was inevitable. He's turned into his Nemesis.

He's the mirror image of Dildo Really--an overblown, gassy, fat bastard who won't shut the fuck up. He had an amusing left-of-center program with a large following, but he felt compelled, for whatever reason (could her name be Katy?), to shit on half his audience by sticking it to Clinton.

He doesn't realize that half (or more) of these Obama fans who are watching him now will abandon him the minute the election is over and the Cartoon Channel or Comedy Central has a jazzy, more amusing show running at eight p.m. He isn't the Pied Piper, he's just the most appealing to that subset who are hooked into the "political" thing--for now.

[dflprincess]

3. Why not?

The press pretty much picked the candidates.

[Clear Blue Sky]

5. Exactly. They decided who should run, who should get the nomination and who should quit. n/t

[liberal N proud]

4. Well it is their campaign/election

They have told us who we can support, who we can vote for so it would only be natural for them to feel the right to tell the candidates when they can be part of their show and when they have to bow out.

The basically told all the other candidates when they were done simply by the fact that they quit discussing them or allowing them air time.

A government for the corporations by the corporations mediated by the right wing media.

[KSinTX]

10. Are you for real?

Remember the infamous "Dean Scream?" My neighbor mentioned it a couple of days ago as a reason he was such a bad presidential candidate. WTF I asked myself silently. The media determined then that he was unelectable: "The scream scene was shown an estimated 633 times by cable and broadcast news networks in just four days following the incident, a number that does not include talk shows and local news broadcasts." This is neither a new standard nor new behavior. It's just now happening to Hillary Clinton. And, in many ways, to Barack Obama. The media has been so successful in past in molding our political views and behavior, and has been rewarded through our resultant vote modification, that it should come as no surprise that it continues to do so. We brought this on ourselves by lending the press (entertainers) such credence.

[DeepModem Mom]

11. Good points, KS -- and just to be clear, you're addressing the author of the piece...

and not me, the poster.

[KSinTX]

12. Klar! It's just insane how quickly we forget our histories

Hence destined to repeat them each. I just get so riled when folks ascribe to "the media" or a specific candidate actions that have been employed and rewarded time and time again - as though it was something shockingly new. We are not powerless against it, just too myopic to acknowledge it in the first place. Political Groundhog Day, no?

[DeepModem Mom]

13. Yes. I have to admit I hadn't thought of this piece...

in the context of your example: all the Dean supporters who were written off when he was written off by the media as a candidate.