The metaphor of the week was "last piece in the puzzle." The piece in question was Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, newly anointed contender for vice president. And "the pick" was the news that kept on giving. From Tuesday morning, when Senator Kerry made his choice known, through this Sunday, when the two Johns will appear together on 60 Minutes, the new look of the presumptive Democratic ticket dominated headlines, thanks to a carefully crafted media strategy of photo-friendly events spread over the course of the week. Brooke and Bob recap.
Listeners weigh in on our coverage of voter disenfranchisement in Florida, as well as our handling of the 9/11 Commission's recent reports.
With his poll numbers slipping even on issues previously dominated by Republicans, and critical media coverage of his administration higher-ups making headlines every day, the president and inner circle have been visibly dodging and deflecting for several weeks now. But where is John Kerry? Is the Democratic challenger intentionally lying low, saving his media strength for the last lap? And is this the strategy that he used to win the first time around? No and no, says former Kerry rival Howard Dean. Bob discusses the campaign with the world's leading expert on getting skunked by Kerry.
On Wednesday, a judge in Florida heard arguments in a case brought by CNN against the State of Florida. At issue is the list of convicted felons in the state, who under Florida law, must be purged from the voting rolls. State law allows the press to view the list, but not to copy or disseminate it. Florida Senator Bill Nelson, who has joined CNN in its lawsuit, tells Brooke why he thinks it's so important that the media have full access to the list
Much was made over the extent to which media prognosticators got it wrong in the lead-up to the early Democratic presidential primaries. But this isn't the only democracy in which pundits are often contradicted by actual events. Take India, for example, where the Sonia Gandhi's Congress Party recently defied most predictions and displaced the ruling party from office. Brooke talks to Shailaja Bajpai, a columnist for the Indian Express in New Delhi, about the Indian media's poor performance.
After interviewing more than a thousand adults in the 18 battleground states that have been running campaign commercials since March, the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey found that 61 percent believe that President Bush favors sending jobs overseas, and that John Kerry voted for higher taxes 350 times, even though, as the New York Times noted this week, neither of those assertions are true. Only 19 percent of those surveyed admitted to believing the ads, but that's the only place where they would find those so-called facts. So how did those interviewed get their information? Atlantic senior editor Joshua Green explains the nefarious practice of Opposition Research.
The editor of the Appleton Post Crescent had received calls charging that the paper was biased against President Bush, and moreover, that it never printed any letters supporting him. So the paper responded with an editorial that said, "if you would like to help us 'balance' things out, send us a letter, make a call or punch out an e-mail." In other words, you don't like the letters? Write your own. Executive Editor Andrew Oppman tells Brooke of the contretemps that ensued.
Is the mainstream media prematurely writing off the chances of John Kerry for President? Salon writer Tim Grieve thinks so. As he tells Bob, recent coverage of Kerry is strikingly similar to the coverage that Bill Clinton received in 1992. And like his Democratic predecessor, Grieve says, Kerry still has a good shot at the White House.
