I posted the following in an email to CNN this morning.
Regarding your story about the Howard Dean "Bad Date" internet experience:
The debunking of the effectiveness of the Dean internet campaign at winning primaries entirely missed the mark. What defeated Dean was nothing less than a media that was obviously and clearly determined to stop this candidate. The "gaffes" that were attributed to Dean by the TV news purveyors were no worse than the dozens of comments from other candidates that could have been played up but were carefully ignored. The classic example was Dean's statement about the hypothetical capture of Osama Bin Laden about which Dean said (paraphrasing) "If I had him in my sights, I'd probably pull the trigger but if we get him in custody, I think he should receive a fair trial under U.S. law." For this he was, ridiculously, lambasted. Tell me what is wrong with this statement? What should he have said? "Let's lynch Osama on Times Square"??? Equally negative spin could have been relentlessly applied to Kerry (special interest contributions, trashing his medals), Bush (falsified war rationale, reckless government spending,...), and others but it wasn't. The coverage of the Dean campaign has been nothing short of atrocious.
Up until the end of October, Dean was the media darling with his upstart excitement and his underdog status. My wife predicted what would happen next. Noticing the huge wave of anti-Dean sentiment that was quickly building in the electronic and print media, she predicted that the majority of the voters, who did not yet know about Dean, would discover him in the context of the new spin which pictured Dean as "Angry", "Impetuous", "Un-presidential", "a Loose Cannon", and other EDITORIAL characterizations. This is, in fact, exactly what happened. Today's story which said that voters courted Dean but married Kerry is totally false. The voters who polled for Dean in December and voted for Kerry or Edwards in January were swayed by the overwhelming anti-Dean bias of the editorialized "news" coverage. Shame on the media. A recent study of media coverage showed negative coverage of Kerry and Edwards to be running in the 45-50 % range but negative coverage of Dean to be 78 %.
What is clear to me is that Dean was defeated by an antagonistic press, something that no internet campaign or any organizing effort can ever defeat. The press now has the power to elect the president.
Dean supporters are going to turn out to vote for a Democratic nominee in November '04 who will be running against the most destructive president in American history, but they will definitely be holding their noses.
In presenting the "Bad Date" story about Dean, CNN is covering their tracks by vilifying Dean after the fact to justify their hack job during the campaign.
What America needs now is the Dean proposed reduction in media ownership concentration. But this flies in the face of what the media conglomerates want. And these foxes are watching the hen house.
