A recent piece by Eric Boehlert implicitly pitches a notion about Hillary Clinton that I see expressed more and more, by Democrat or supposedly "progressive" pundits, and especially on discussion forums: that harsh corporate-media criticism of the senator, whether of her policies or character or aspects of her current campaign, serves as a REASON for supporting her as a presidential candidate. Boehlert's piece focuses on coverage of Clinton's performance in the recent debate in Philadelphia, arguing that criticisms were overblown due to commentators' hostility to Clinton, and finishing with these comments:

"Lastly, let's note that the mainstream press and the Republican Party are now in perfect unison when it comes to the topic of Clinton: She has a deeply flawed character. (It's the same conclusion they came to about Gore's character in 2000 and about Sen. John Kerry's character in 2004.) In fact, when the RNC released a Clinton attack video on the Internet last week, it was filled almost entirely with clips of reporters and pundits denigrating Clinton's debate performance.

Republicans don't even have to send out their talking points; members of the press are more than willing to recite the old ones for free."
- from 'Hillary, the debate, and the media folly,'  by Eric Boehlert,  Nov. 6,  MediaMatters.com
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200711060002?f=h_column

A recent post I came across on a discussion forum, about the media and Clinton, succinctly states the apparently-widespread view among some Democrats that such biased coverage makes the candidate more attractive:

"...This is how the media operates against people they perceive as their political enemies and if it comes down to defending the media or defending Hillary, I am going to go with Hillary every time. In fact, if the media fears her so much as measured by the number and intensity of phony scandal mongering, that will go some way in changing my opinion of her."

I think this is a very mistaken judgment. In my view, Hillary Clinton has been the subject of the corporate media's most successful propaganda effort of the last decade and a half -- one in which observers on some sectors of the left, as well as the right, have been led to accept an extremely distorted image of what she really stands for as a politician. For rightwingers, Hillary's been depicted as the 'Madame Mao' of ultra-liberalism, and thus for them has become a despised and feared figure, and, not-so-incidentally, invaluable to the Republicans as a tool in rallying their base. In reaction, many liberal and even progressive Dems have come to accept her as a strongly liberal figure who needs to be defended and supported against all the crazed hate-vibes from the right and their media rabble-rousers.

What's vitally important here is that the real Hillary Clinton, judged by the policies and positions which she actually advocates, is not a liberal in the traditional sense, let alone progressive. She exemplifies the fifth-column DLC line of corporatist servitude to big-moneyed interests, alike to the Republicans' position, and to the detriment of the middle-class working people of America. That is, to the people who are not only the traditional interest-base of the Democratic Party, but who've been the bedrock of this country's economic well-being throughout much of the last century, and whose birthright of a high standard of living is now being eroded by policies driven by the greed of corporations and the super-rich in our increasingly corrupted political system. Key among those big-moneyed interests today, served loyally by politicians like Clinton, is the alliance which pushed us into the occupation of Iraq, and threatens to expand U.S. warmaking in the Middle East and beyond for a generation. Despite deceitful doubletalk about withdrawing "combat troops," a Clinton presidency, as much as, say, a Romney presidency, will mean years of expanding war, but with one disheartening difference: with Mrs. Clinton at the helm, many mainstream Dems would try and finesse-away their nominal opposition to the warmaking out of a misplaced notion of loyalty to their party. Indeed, we're seeing this happen already, as Clinton's "inevitability" as a nominee endures, with the Iowa contest just over the horizon.

Just as the wingnuts in the other end of the political arena are being played for suckers by media propagandists in buying the image of Hillary as an ultra-liberal demoness, liberal and progressive Democrats who react to that spectacle by looking on Clinton with sympathy are biting a baited hook, doing just what corporate media propagandists scheme for them to do. I'm sure they're laughing up their sleeves with satisfaction to see it happen. The corporate media's agenda, in fact, accords both with the Republicans' and the DLC's, in their desire to control and level the two mainstream parties in a system designed to shut out competition from third parties, so that we're left with, that's right, a choice between a corporatist Tweedledum and Tweedledee, which differ mainly in rhetoric, and perhaps in the speed of the decline being foisted onto middle-class America. The Naderite left may have been wrong in 2000 about the similarity of the two major-party presidential candidates that year, but exasperatingly enough, judging from the choices we face today, the difference appears to have narrowed in the period since, even though the public has gone in the direction opposite to that taken by the Beltway elite of the Democratic Party. Indeed, polls which follow longterm trends in public support for political positions on issues, rather than dealing in the trashy distractions which take up so much of political "discourse" these days, show that the majority of Americans favor a set of policies which accords closely with the traditional agenda of the pre-DLC Democratic Party. If we traditional Democrats can somehow take the reins from the DLC-ilk and serve that majority, we can still possibly turn America's economic decline around, and end the imperialist war project which threatens to bring so much further suffering and destruction. But, if Democratic and swing voters in 2008 can be lulled into accepting a Hillary Clinton as representing the furthest "left" which they can reasonably hope for in a presidential candidate, we're screwed. And if it turns out that we ARE screwed, the corporate media's control over political perceptions has everything to do with bringing that situation about.

The dominant political media in this country, largely because of changes in ownership restrictions, has long since become a corporatist propaganda industry. Distrust of the media is extremely well-justified. However, this doesn't mean that the media as an entity can't be cheaply and self-servingly scapegoated under some circumstances, by advocates from any sector of the political arena. Consider how the wingnuts blame "the liberal media" in a kneejerk fashion over any development they don't like, whether failures in the Iraq mission or Bush's long-waning popularity (which, in fact, that so-called "liberal media" has endeavored unsuccessfully to try and raise all through his two terms in office.) Let's not kid ourselves: we Democrats, liberals, and progressives are perfectly capable of playing the same game, and should be wary of it. Yes, the media is very biased, and peddles lies and distortions constantly, but they're certainly not above reporting the truth when it happens to serve their agenda to do so. Above all, we should always keep abreast of their efforts to manipulate our views, and to discern the truth from lies on the political scene, for the vital sake of defending our own real interests as citizens.

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Thank you Pete for continuing to express your opinions about Hillary and other topics. The Democratic party has had conservative members for decades. That does not appear new. Southern Democrats controlled committee assignments during the 1960's and 1970's and some legislation never saw the light of day. It took Lyndon Johnson to persuade people in congress to pass civil rights legislation.

I hope more and more people see that Hillary would act not much better for the middle class than Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson.  

--Last edited by www.dmocrats.org on 2007-11-13 19:14:44 --