The coverage of 2016’s crop of candidates illustrates the primacy of subjective, opinion journalism. Do samples culled from publications and websites during the past three months reveal whether or not they propel readers to see the crop of candidates from both parties clearly, or at least more clearly than the veil of objective neutrality permits?
GEORGE SALAMON / Writing about Marie Antoinette, Judith Thurman commented in a 2006 article in the New Yorker that the woman famous for a remark she never uttered (“Let them eat cake”) is “periodically reviled or celebrated.” The same could be said about the media’s treatment of Hillary Clinton since she stepped into the national limelight as Bill Clinton’s wife during his 1992 bid for the presidency. Now that she is campaigning for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, many publications and websites devote much of their coverage to one or the other of these familiar approaches. Recent opinion pieces in the online publications of the liberal New Republic and the conservative Washington Free Beacon provide a sort of “comfort food,” the first for Clinton admirers and the second for Clinton detractors. But neither provides much food for thought based on solid information, history and context.
By GEORGE SALAMON / When Islamist gunmen killed 10 journalists and two policemen in January at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine firebombed in 2011 for its irreverent cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, media reaction to the massacre immediately after was best summed up by the headline of an article in Reason magazine: “I’m all for free speech and murder is wrong, but…” In much of the media the “but” trumped admiration and respect for the slain journalists’ insistence that religions, along with other institutions and ideas, can and should be mocked and laughed at. Media might want to ask themselves if the “negative liberty” granted by the First Amendment allows exceptions for legally irrelevant categories such as “bad taste” or “bad judgment.”
By GEORGE SALAMON / Soon after Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy on April 12 for the 2016 presidential race, Rebecca Traister reported for the New Republic: “So what could possibly go wrong? Everything. Anything. Anything and everything. Hillary Clinton has loomed so powerfully in the American consciousness for so long that it’s hard to remember how delicate, how combustible, how ultimately improbable the project of electing her president is likely to be.” Traister paid too little attention to Clinton’s individual flaws that could propel “anything” and “everything” to go wrong.
By GEORGE SALAMON / The conservative and right-wing media were offended. The liberal and left-wing ones were amused. At the center of the tempest in the Easter basket were remarks made by President Obama at the April 6 prayer breakfast in the East Room of the White House.