Organizing for America | Lan's Blog: The media "narratives"

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The media "narratives"

By Lan Fleming - Jul 5th, 2008 at 5:48 pm EDT

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The corporate news media no longer provides news; they manufacture "narratives." And those narratives are generally favorable to Republican candidates in every election and damaging to Democrats. The flip-flop narrative, effectively used against John Kerry is now being dutifully echoed in all the major newspapers and broadcast TV and cable channels in a barrage of media attacks against Obama, thinly disguised as objective news stories.

Obama says he's puzzled that his statement about refining his policy on Iraq as facts warrant has caused such a stir. I don't think he should be puzzled; his statement was deliberately distorted by the media, as were Wesley Clark's comments, which were twisted in order to fit the media's "doubtful patriotism" narrative.

Every time Obama elaborates or clarifies his position on some issue, the media now try to shoe-horn it into their "flip-flop" narrative. John McCain's radical changes in position such as opposing off-shore drilling in May but favoring it in June never gets covered in the media (I learned about McCain's off-shore drilling flip-flop on the Daily Show).

The website MediaMatters.org keeps an updated list of reports of the latest media distortions and outright lies, most of which in this election year are targeted a Obama. I hope Obama's campaign staff uses it as a resource. I'm not sure what Obama can do when the media act in concert to distort his words and his record. One suggestion I have is for Obama's campaign to comment on the stories in MediaMatters and similar sources in their teleconferences with the corporate media reporters whose colleagues are responsible for the distortions and call them out for it in no uncertain terms. I think Obama's campaign should also go after McCain's flip-flops more publicly than they've done

When a candidate or his top advisers talk to reporters about a subject, they really have no choice but to report on it publicly. At least that's true of the Republican candidate. Let's see if it holds for a Democrat.

BTW: I'm opposed to immunity for telecoms that have committed crimes. I'd be happy if Obama actually did (gasp) flip-flop a little on this and work to get this malodorous immunity provision removed from the FISA bill.

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