EE Speaks Out

Last Sunday, Elizabeth Edwards summed up the frustration of many with the press coverage of this campaign.

And here are the letters on it.

I think one of the letters makes a good point that this is really a conspiracy among the media, lazy consumer of media, spin consultants and candidates themselves.
When I wrote a lengthy post depicting the electorate as hungry for the real truth about issues and urging Obama to stop being careful and really offer the voters some straight talk, a political consultant sent it back to me annotated, explainng that I was naive to suppose that a candidate could really speak his mind and move away from carefully focus-group-tested platitudes.

Really? Was it the blogs.

Bittergate, blogs and the newly insecure mainstream media.

Media Matters

Media Matters has a slightly different history and function than PEJ, but I'll let you figure out the details.

Introducing PEJ

Here's a site that tries to quantify the campaign coverage.

This particular page looks at the way McCain was covered while the Democratic primary was on high heat.

Night of the Generals

This isn't really a campaign story, but it raised one of the darkest questions yet about what, exactly, we're seeing when we watch television news.

ABC's very bad day, followed by the fickle finger

Before the PA primary, Clinton and Obama debated on ABC prompting a kind of Bastille moment, when some people seemed to lose patience with the scandal-obsessed media. ABC, of course, disputed the criticism.

Not that the media was completely chastened. Almost immediately, there was a smaller fuss over whether Obama, in reacting to the debate days later, had surreptitiously given Clinton (or someone) the finger.

And then there was Zapruder-like analysis proving he hadn't. Note in the comments that some people immeidately anaologized to Seinfeld's "the pick." This was one of many moments people seemed to feel they had already seen somewhere else in pop culture.