All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Newton’s Third Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Campaign journalism works in much the same way. A candidate enjoys some positive press and then – with a precision you could darn near set a watch by – he or she starts to get criticized. It’s a little like Wack-a-Mole, where you pop up and get smacked. And it’s a little like skeet – you aim high for the sky, but then once you hit a certain trajectory, POW the shots start coming.

Two examples of late: Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. He was the media darling Cinderella story of the Iowa straw poll, way exceeding the expectations set by the media.

Based on those results and a great on-camera persona, Huckabee built up a little steam, started showing up on cable news political shows, had a “Real Time with Bill Maher” one-on-one and gained traction with his momentum and awshuckiness.

Then, Newton’s Law of Media Backlash took effect.

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Entertainment mogul David Geffen, who supports Sen. Barack Obama for president, recently made some critical remarks about Hillary Clinton and her husband. The comments were reported in a Maureen Dowd column. The Clinton campaign came out swinging in the wake of the comments, and Obama's team shot right back. And then the media jumped on what is ultimately a pretty insignificant story.

The press wants to have it both ways with this one – media outlets are giving the kerfuffle a ton of play (it made the front pages of three major national newspapers today), but they are also wondering if "people [will] be able to take 18 1/2 months of this," as Eat The Press put it. The New York Post put the story on its cover, under the headline "The Big Chill," while the New York Daily News asked: "Two Years Of This?"

You mean two years of media outlets overplaying minor stories that drive narratives but have little real substantive value? Yeah, I'm dreading that too.

There’s no shortage of schadenfreude being experienced over The New York Times’ problems. Those with one bone or another to pick with Judy Miller, bloggers who chant the mantra of MSM demise and critics of the war in Iraq are just a few who are reveling in the now-very public internal fighting at the paper.



I say good for The Times.



Not praise for the mess they find themselves in, surely. Miller’s pre-war stories about weapons of mass destruction, the paper’s apology for them, not to mention Miller’s still-curious role in the Valerie Plame case are among the things the Times’ has been suffering from for some time, and will continue to haunt them in the foreseeable future. And while Miller’s attorney, Robert Bennett, may be right about old scores being settled, at least we’re seeing a public airing of it all.

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