August 03, 2004

Excellent (as always) Krugman column, on TV coverage of last week's convention, and how the success of Fox News has come to color the political coverage of other networks, including CNN. Kerry's so-called "Baby Bounce" fits in with this type of "journalism"; take an outlying poll (Gallup) that shows Kerry losing ground, ignore the half-dozen other surveys that show the reverse (including, more importantly, the state-by-state polls that show Kerry pulling out to a sizeable Electoral College lead), remove the election from its context as a sharply divided battle between two implacable adversaries (did anyone seriously believe Kerry was going to leave the convention with a twenty-point lead?), and you have what Eric Alterman has called a successful case of "working the ref" by the GOP. Media whores, indeed....

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