Gen. Clark, sir, could you just step over this way? Just a bit more to your left ... A bit more ... Right under that noose would be just fine. With Nedra apparently on a bit of a break, her devoted fans at What a Pickler decided to poach on NYT territory, and nominated Edward Wyatt's quick hatchet job on Wesley Clark as the "worst piece of political journalism for the day."

As Vincent Vega would have said, that's a bold statement. Wyatt's piece is A11, but it bears what we might call a proleptic relationship to the front page—that sound you hear is of the guns trundling into position behind the lines. You don't need to look much farther than the headline: Knotty Issues for Clark, Trying to Untangle Them. If the general gets any kind of traction coming out of New Hampshire, bet on it you'll come to know this one thing about him: he's inconsistent, his inconsistency generates questions, because he's a political novice he gets himself in worse trouble trying to resolve them. A troubling pattern of behavior, and certainly Not Presidential. It's right there in the last two grafs, quoting Tony Coelho, one of the piece's two useful-idiot Democrats-who-will-say-something-bad-about-Clark:

Others remain unconvinced, however. Mr. Coelho said General Clark's responses in the last couple of weeks "show that he is a little out of sync."

"When you run for president, there is a presumption of being a leader," he said. "People don't care as much if they disagree with you. They just want to be able to trust you."

Rhetoric, even the most neutral-seeming—especially the most neutral-seeming—is never innocent. Observe the sleight-of-hand Wyatt's article employs throughout: the issue [of past Clark votes for Republicans] "popped up again" after Brit Hume raised it in Thursday's debate, the general has "become tangled this week in questions" about abortion and Iraq, he "has faced questions" since appearing with Michael Moore about Moore's characterizing President AWOL as a "deserter." Wyatt employs the figure of suppression of agency: questions are endowed with their own motion, no one in particular asks them and they have no context except the history of their own career as questions. It's one of the fundamental obscurantist tropes of political journalism, a way of soliciting you not to think about the means and aims of journalists. Try this: when you see this sort of construction, translate it mentally to put the human agency back in, and notice everything this rhetoric works to elide—who asked these questions, why did they ask them, were these the only questions asked, were they the most pressing? And that's the beginning of critique.

posted by michael  6:11:22 PM  
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Some context within the wider world of Dean coverage for the job Jodi Wilgoren's been doing on him in the last week is available at CJR's Campaign Desk. It's especially interesting to watch the rapidity with which the reporting on Dean's post-Iowa speech, reasonably neutral at first, rapidly and inexorably coalesces around the Dean-is-unhinged meme. CJR links to a fine, sharply observed piece by Howard Kurtz in summing up:

In an article in yesterday's Washington Post, Howard Kurtz observed that "For the media, the story now is not so much about pitting Dean against John Kerry, John Edwards or Wesley Clark as exploring the psychodrama of Dean vs. Dean." In the hermetically sealed world of campaign coverage, Dean's post-caucus speech is no longer just a speech -- it's a symptom.

The Campaign Desk is a great idea, great use of the Columbia Journalism Review property, and good stuff is fast accumulating there. Bookmark it.

posted by michael  4:53:54 PM  
tell me about it []