Word: deanã
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Members of the mainstream press covering former Vermont Gov. Howard B. Dean??s presidential run apparently didn’t sleep through their high school English classes, where they learned that compelling stories always follow arcs from beginning to climax to denouement. Being good pupils, they constructed a now-familiar narrative around the candidate, first building him into an outsider-turned-frontrunner and then relentlessly tearing him down. The storyline bore little relationship to the facts of the campaign, but after reporters and editors decided that the peak had been reached—roughly ten months before...
...clear. Time magazine selected Dean in its final issue of the year for a photoessay of the “People Who Mattered 2003”—at first seeming a positive choice, until one noticed that, alone among the dozen or so other entries, Dean??s photo was a blurry gray shot of his back talking to four or five equally blurry members of the press at a blurry location. All the other photos were well-lit images including their subject’s faces—not a bad objective for responsible photojournalism...
...media handled those who questioned the balance of their coverage with a pat analysis: Dean brought it all on himself with a single character flaw, his “anger.” Never mind that they found exactly zero meaningful examples of Dean??s supposed short fuse—no instances of the doctor having blown up at family or employees in Vermont’s government. Still, the media’s team of pop psychologists had already certified him incurably “angry.” Their distorted case against Dean seemed closed when...
Within weeks, reports of Dean??s demise were being greatly exaggerated, or at least greatly rushed. On Feb. 2, right after Iowa, Time wrote, “Howard Dean found himself clawing his way back from his near-death experience”—despite the fact that his brush with “death” had consisted of picking up a respectable number of delegates before the polls opened in 49 out of 50 states. Once set in motion, nothing could derail the media’s plotline, which left the doctor no room...
...earliest months of an election year, but a self-fulfilling prophecy when many people believe whatever their TV anchor tells them. In one glaring example of an obituary published before death, the CBS affiliate in Jacksonville, Fla. posted on its website a Knight-Ridder wire story announcing Dean??s Wisconsin loss, comparing his campaign to a “plummeting comet,” at 8:42 in the morning on Feb. 17, just hours after the Wisconsin polls had opened and long before even preliminary results were available. Knight-Ridder is widely regarded as a high-level...