Digby has a nice post up about media narratives, and he links to a bunch of posts about it (from the likes of Jamison Foser, Peter Daou, Steve Benon, Christy at FDL, Stirling Newberry, and a frequent source of the Quote of the Day, Tbogg. You should read the whole post...and the comments, too, for that matter.
I haven't a clue where to start with his "How do we fix this?" query. Most of the comments, while interesting, don't really contribute much useful (though the only way we'll ever come up with anything useful is to continue to have the conversation). I do have one thing to add, though...
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that, while I absolutely love what Al Gore has done the last few years, and while part of me would love for him to run in '08, it gives me an anxiety attack thinking about a) what the media would obviously do to him once again, and b) whether Stiff Wooden Eye-Rolling Al would reappear when he got himself back into a campaign. While I admit to still being a bit nervous about (b), I've completely changed my tune about (a). ANY Democratic candidate, be it Al Gore or Superman or (gag) even Joe Lieberman, would get slaughtered by the media once he became the mainstream candidate. Since that is the case, it seems to me that Al Gore is the best candidate simply because he knows what to expect. Aside from Clinton, the last three Democratic candidates (Dukakis, Gore, Kerry) have all expressed regret after the election that they didn't fight back sooner and that they should have known what was coming. Well...Al Gore's a pretty smart guy. Seems to me he'd know what was coming this time and would be a lot more likely to fight back. Granted, Hilary has Bill on her side, and that experience can't hurt, but she's too busy bending and sculpting the perfect position to take on every issue to actually bother herself with standing for something.
There would obviously still be obstacles in the way of Gore a) getting the nomination, and b) winning. Case in point (from Foser, linked above):
And then Al Gore came along and, as The Daily Howler's Bob Somerby argues convincingly, was treated to the most relentlessly hostile (not to mention dishonest) media coverage any major party presidential candidate had ever seen. He was mocked for wearing "earth tones" (who doesn't?). Reporters simply made up quotes they attributed to him, then declared him a liar because the quotes -- which he never spoke -- were exaggerations. And, to be clear: when we say reporters made up quotes, we aren't talking about Rush Limbaugh or Matt Drudge. We're talking about The New York Times and The Washington Post.You can read that and think that Al's too tainted to have a shot, and that'd be a relatively legitimate opinion. And to be sure, Al was far from a perfect candidate...I'm still pissed about certain moves he made (and actions he took....cough cough Lieberman cough cough) in 2000. But again, that exact scenario (candidate emerges -> candidate shot down -> Democrats decide getting shot down was his own fault -> Democrats write him out of the script) will play out with every new guy that emerges. To me, it seems at this point that Al Gore is the best person to handle that scenario because he's already read ahead in the script. He knows how the book ends, and he might be the only one capable of changing the ending.
And still, reporters and pundits and progressive activists and Democratic leaders -- people who should have known better -- chalked it all up to Gore being a lousy candidate. Sure, they said, the media exaggerated about Gore's exaggerations, but they wouldn't have if he wasn't such an exaggerator. Never mind that every example given fell apart under scrutiny: each lie told about Gore being a liar reinforced the others. It was Gore's fault the media went overboard, just as it had been Clinton's. And his consultants' fault, too -- there were too many of them, or too few, or too inside, or they weren't good enough. And so people who should have known better thought it wouldn't happen again; not when there was a new candidate with new consultants.
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