All this week: The culture of “horrible coverage!”

MONDAY, JULY 28, 2014

Also, the culture of silence: If Hillary Clinton runs for president, she may well get her party’s nomination.

If she does, is she “destined to get horrible coverage” from the mainstream press corps?

Last Friday, Mark Halperin made that prediction on Morning Joe—and he stressed the word “horrible.” Three days earlier, he had made a similar statement on the same program.

For fuller background, see this morning’s post.

We’ll look at last Tuesday’s Morning Joe in tomorrow’s principal post. For now, here are some excerpts from Halperin’s statements that day:

HALPERIN (7/22/14): She’s lost control of her public image. It’s the worst thing that can happen to someone thinking of running for president.

[...]

She has a lot of positive attributes that are currently just being overwhelmed by all this negative coverage. And it’s going to keep going. The momentum, there’s, there’s— The press loves to cover her hard.

As we’ll see, the other Morning Joe pundits feigned incomprehension concerning the reasons for the negative coverage. But according to Halperin:

“The negative coverage is going to keep going...The press loves to cover her hard.”

As we noted this morning, those are very unusual statements from a press insider. Beyond that, it seems to us that Halperin’s predictions and statements make sense.

All this week, we’ll explore the ways the other pundits on Morning Joe reacted to Halperin’s statements. This involves the culture of horrible coverage, a culture extending back many years.

But it also involves the culture of press corps silence.

As you’ll see, the other pundits feigned incomprehension about the reasons for this “horrible coverage.” Other journalists did the same thing in October and November 1999, when Howard Kurtz asked two different pundit panels why Candidate Gore was attracting so much “harsh coverage and punditry.”

Guess what, marks? Big pundits always feign incomprehension when challenged about their conduct. And just so you’ll know, this culture of silence extends all the way down to your favorite liberal stars.

Your darling Rachel will never tell you the things we’ll be telling you all this week. Chris Hayes has a horrible tendency to start reciting mainstream narratives when people like Susan Rice or Hillary Clinton start getting trashed by the powers that be.

Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Matthews? They were major players in the two-year war against Candidate Gore. In part for such reasons, other career liberals simply can’t tell you the history of those years.

Drum and Dionne understand the history, but there’s little chance they will ever discuss it. You will not hear from your favorite players in the career liberal world.

All week, we’ll discuss that prediction of “horrible coverage” for a Candidate Clinton. We’ll also discuss the culture of silence which has obtained for all these years, dating to Kurtz’s dumbfounded panels in 1999.

In our supplemental posts, we’ll look at other horrible journalism coming from some of our fiery liberals. Good lord, our work can be poor!

For many years, the liberal world was essentially silent. In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, the liberal web began taking form.

Now, liberal and progressive voices are widely, easily heard. Sometimes, we wonder if progressive values were better served when we all kept quiet.

Starting in March 1999, Candidate Gore was treated to twenty months of “horrible coverage.” In the main, that coverage came from the mainstream press corps, not from the RNC.

To state the obvious, that horrible coverage sent Bush to the White House. Halperin says it could happen again.

To watch those Morning Joe discussions: Last week, Morning Joe panels staged two discussions of Hillary Clinton’s press coverage.

We thought Mike Barnacle was the star of last Tuesday’s discussion. We’ll discuss his comments on Wednesday. To watch that whole segment, click here.

On Friday, Halperin made his prediction. To watch that segment, click this.