The Politics of Pringles..Once You Start You Just Can't Stop

A common theme in the political horserace is how journalists like to blame the rest of the media for the proliferation of commentary they deem unjounralistic...when in fact by commenting on it (okay, I am guilty of this too) they just spread the story even further. Here is Mark Halperin of TIME's The Page, talking about his distate for the Palin lipstick coverage while unknowingly spreading the McCain message even more.


From MediaMatters.org:

On the September 9 edition of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, Time magazine senior political analyst Mark Halperin characterized the recent media attention to Sen. Barack Obama's comment that "[y]ou can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig" as "a low point in the day ... and one of the low days of our collective coverage of this campaign."
Halperin also asserted: "Stop the madness. I mean, this is, I think -- with all due respect to the program's focus on this and to what [CNN senior political analyst] David [Gergen] just said -- I think this is the press just absolutely playing into the McCain campaign's crocodile tears."
http://mediamatters.org/items/200809100007?f=h_top



Flashback to 2007 and the Edwards/Haircut story that was like a bad haircut, no matter how you tried to fix it and cover it was gonna take weeks to go away. Here is an article from Eric Alterman on the medias coverage of the Hair Debacle:

"Then there are the haircuts. You won't be surprised to hear that the fact that John Edwards got a couple of expensive haircuts has generated, according to Lexis/Nexis, about a thousand "news" stories. I can't say I've read many of them, but I'd be amazed if any proved more ridiculous than the 1,220-word "investigation" by the Post's John Solomon, who notes, "It is some kind of commentary on the state of American politics that as Edwards has campaigned for president, vice president and now president again, his hair seems to have attracted as much attention as, say, his position on health care." "
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071001/alterman