The Press Adored Her?
Newspaper tradition has it that when slumming journalists assail each other in print the show of scorn jumps exponentially if the other party’s not named.
As Dennis Byrne was saying, “Carol Moseley Braun’s Senate campaign was as content-starved and barren of issues as Bush’s, but you weren’t told about it because adoring reporters were too busy writing about her “charm’ while sharing the joys of her victory lap.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Up to a point, this is true. The Tribune’s Mary Schmich wrote a damning column on Braun in early October, and beforehand she pulled clips from papers all over the country. “I couldn’t find a critical word,” she told us. “It disturbed me. It was all, all sycophantic. Everyone was caught up in the cause. I think toward the end things changed. There was an effort to hypercorrect that maybe went too far.”
Byrne’s the best example we can find of the kind of superficial journalism he complained about: nothing about Braun seemed to interest him beyond her sex and her feminism. We read his recent column as an honorable attempt at self-criticism.
Yet she won easily. She won a victory that reminded us of the way Richard Nixon swept 49 states in 1972, even after Watergate had begun to tear apart his government. Illinois didn’t want Rich Williamson, and the public’s first order of business was to get rid of him. Ultimately, the state chose between symbols. This doesn’t mean reporters failed to do their jobs, only that the symbolism was overpowering.
Campaign Aids
This will go down as the election year in which the communion between the candidates and the public was mediated by Larry King and Phil Donahue. The Sun-Times did some mediating of its own, introducing a couple of new forms of reader-friendly political coverage that deserve to be mentioned.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Loren Santow.
