Media Tunes out Paul and Santorum in Florida Debate Coverage
Read Time:2 Minute, 46 Second
To set some context, if you wanted to recreate yesterday’s Republican primary debate, you would need to breed avid sports fans with the audience from the Jerry Springer Show, raise the kids with a New York attitude, and then bring them together on the stage of the Maury Povich Show to work out their paternity issues. It was just that exciting.
There were cheers and jeers sure to rival this year’s upcoming Super Bowl (I can say that because the Packers won’t be there). The audience loved Newt’s defense of “immigrant grandmothers,” then turned their backs on him when Mitt pointed out “our problem isn’t 11 million grandmothers,” then started hating on Mitt when he denied knowledge of an ad that concludes in his voice: “This is Mitt Romney, and I approved this ad.” They booed. It was beautiful.
The word of the day was “deflect,” with more failed attempts at slight-of-hand than a class of four-year-olds trying to learn their first magic trick. (Mitt almost had me believing that quarters would spring from my ears if he becomes president.) Then Ron Paul rose above the fray, and not to be outdone, Mitt and Newt tried to follow suit—and failed miserably. It was really quite an exhilarating bit of a train wreck.
What was really most fascinating, though, is that Romney and Gingrich represented the pettiest of the bunch, uncomfortable, shifty, deflective—their “fails” were so spectacular that it made me uncomfortable—and yet the follow-up media analyses were written as though they were the only two on stage. ABC called Romney the winner—presumably because Newt was such a loser—but the thorough analysis of the debate didn’t even mention Ron Paul, who by all accounts stole the show, and barely made mention of Santorum.
I could see overlooking a candidate or two if there were a giant panel—you know, kind of like the first episode of each season of The Bachelor, where there are too many women to properly highlight every one. But there were only four, and Paul was the one to draw a consistently positive audience response.
Even CNN, whose on-air post-show commentary highlighted Paul’s strong performance, published an analysis that included only one mention of it, several paragraphs after pointing out that Paul “concedes he has no chance of victory in Florida.”
Either the media has fallen for Newt and Mitt’s sad and off-point efforts at stage-stealing, or there really is a liberal media bias (because really, if either Newt or Mitt get the nomination, how much of a race will that be?). Whatever the case, I don’t think it does justice to our nation to let “high capacity for show-stopping pettiness” determine who gets a fair shake in the presidential race. Selective media attention is a fact of life, but never have I seen it so blatantly done in a race where the outcome is so clearly yet to be determined.
Perhaps the most troubling thing is it doesn’t even make sense. Nasty Newt and Stone-Cold Romney may make for good TV now, but in the long-term, the political sphere couldn’t have given greater gifts to the media than Insane Santorum or Feisty Ron Paul…
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
Trust me when I say this: there is no liberal media. There aren’t even journalists. Bloggers rule, pundits drool.
I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist–and certainly not an anti-liberal conspiracy theorist (like Mr. Mad would put up with that for long!)–but this coverage has just been really weird. I could see focusing on the front-runners if they were actually the best candidates, but really? Newt and Romney? NEWT, for goodness sake?
I think we’ve entered an alternate universe, which I suppose would fit conveniently with Newt’s plan for a space colony…
I thought Paul and Santorum were far better than the other two clowns, and loved Paul’s line about sending politicians to the moon.
Agreed. One mainstream news story I found quoted Ron Paul only once, and entirely out of context–when asked whether Romney and Gingrich should return money earned from Freddie and Fannie, he joked “that subject doesn’t really interest me”–i.e. “I’m not here to debate their personal finances”–but it was used in this story to make him sound like a disinterested and uninvolved observer rather than a provocative participant. Headlines like “Romney, Gingrich go at it in Spirited Debate” and “Gingrich, Romney Clash” entirely silence the other (and quite frankly, based on last night, more attractive) options in this race. It’s really quite bizarre.