The 'media' has it in for Edwards, as they did for Gore. Why?

Media Matters pulls the various reports of media bias against Democratic Presidential candidates together for a rather damning story. What they don't report, however, is what motivates and permits such clear anti-Democratic bias by the media.

America's political reporters don't like John Edwards, and have tried to destroy him.

But don't take my word for it.

Marc Ambinder was one of the founders of ABC's The Note and is a contributing editor to the National Journal's Hotline newsletter. The Note and the Hotline consist largely of links to and excerpts of political news and commentary by other reporters with ample doses of snark and Rove-worship thrown in. Whatever they may lack in insight and judgment, The Note and the Hotline are at the center of the D.C. political media establishment.

Ambinder, in other words, is a political reporter whose job has largely been to understand the political media.

This week, Marc Ambinder explained why the media has covered John Edwards' grooming regimen so much and Mitt Romney's so little:

There is a difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn't like John Edwards.

Fairly or unfairly, there's also a difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was trying to bury Edwards. It's not so much interested in burying Romney right now -- many reporters think he's the Republican frontrunner.

Now, if reporters dislike a candidate, that's their business. But when they wage a relentless and petty campaign to "bury" that candidate, that's our business. All of us.

And we've been through this before.

The 2000 election was close enough that any number of things can fairly be described as having made the difference. But what Bob Somerby describes as the media's "War Against Gore" was undoubtedly one of the biggest factors in Bush's "victory." The contempt many political reporters felt for Gore is clear, as is the inaccurate, unfair, and grossly distorted coverage of Gore that decided the campaign. And, again, you needn't take my word for it: Bob Somerby, Eric Alterman, Eric Boehlert, and others have chronicled the acknowledgements by working journalists of their colleagues' hate for Gore. Jake Tapper described reporters "hissing" -- actually hissing -- Gore. Time's Eric Pooley described an incident in which a roomful of reporters "erupted in a collective jeer" of Gore "like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd."

And Joe Scarborough -- conservative television host Joe Scarborough; former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough -- has said that during the 2000 election, the media "were fairly brutal to Al Gore. ... [I]f they had done that to a Republican candidate, I'd be going on your show saying, you know, that they were being biased."

For this to be a conspiracy in the media there would have to be some group initiating the slurs of a particular Democratic candidate, and editors placing known biased reporters into reporting jobs covering those candidates. This wouldn't be a bit difficult when you consider how many of the top managers of the TV networks and publishers of newspapers are, in fact, extremely conservative.

Then if any major media reporter were to report on this tendency, either his stories would be spiked or the reporter would be left unsupported by the rest of the media. Since it does not make the media look good, this is exactly the reaction to be expected.

Conservatives have also "Worked the Refs" for years, complaining en mass about stories they considered biased against conservatism. Democrats have not been so tightly organized towards getting out the "Democratic message." In fact, the Democrats celebrate the disagreements, so organized efforts and astro-turf people's movements to complain about the media have not been developed on the side of the Democrats. This has allowed the media to drift too far right, a tendency strongly encouraged by right-wing extremist media owners like Richard Mellon Scaife and Rupert Murdoch.

The pressures on the media to report positively on right-wingers and attack Democrats make attacks on Democratic candidates like Gore and Edwards quite possible. The same pressures prevent adequate responses to those biased attacks on democrats by the few media critics who are published and widely read. Similar biased attacks on Republican candidates will never occur. Reporters and pundits who attempt such attacks would quickly find that they can be replaced by others equally talented and more compliant.

The level of direct control of the media that would allow this to be called a conspiracy isn't there. What is there is a social and political group which has both the money and the motivation to strongly influence the way the declining public media reports on politics and political candidates. There is sufficient control of FOX News and their TV channel as well as the captive right-wing Regnary Publishing to influence a lot of the media towards their issue while frightening them off of reporting against their issues. Since the public is mostly indifferent to the political ideology wars, this influence which has been mostly concealed from public sight and constant over a period of decades is what has created the current American society in which the idea of education and healthcare as a Right for every person cannot get the political support it needs to become reality.

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See also the discussion of the conservative Republican Party in the consequences of Iraq which I published yesterday.