Letters to the Editor
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Is it another case of a lack of incentives?
Surely a press dedicated to controversy (as ours appears to be) would have lept upon the first or second time McCain stated this nonexistant link. Yet most continue to treat him as a legitimate "expert" on the issue.
I realize its been asked and possibly answered before, but what ultimately is behind this double-standard?
I can't see how it is just the 'access' McCain affords select members of the press; I'm sure Clinton and Obama do the same, at least as far as their campaign's operations go. Neither to my knowledge can compete on the private level with McCain's "modes cabin" in Sedona.
Yet he remains a man who demonstrates a worrying lack of policy expertise and keeps questionable company. His rhetorical flubs are considerably less amusing than Bush's and given his predecessor's emphasis upon 'terrorism' being such a threat, a mistake such as this Iran/Al Qaeda conflation should surely have set off warning bells and invited greater scrutiny purely as a rich source of the controversy that sells papers and can fill airtime.
But it doesn't. None of it does. Why?
I would suggest it isn't really because the media consider him an 'expert' or even because they like him all that much. Rather I suspect its a matter of ingrained habit to keep on the Republican's good side and present favorable coverage, plus a lack of positive incentives to aggressively pursue substantive issues.
This isn't to suggest a conscious or ideological bias on their part towards McCain or his party per se; indeed, given the draconian language often employed against reporters who buck the party line of late, one would think reporters would be even more vigorous in their pursuit of McCain (if only out of some sense of professional pride).
But with the prevalence of the 24-hour news cycle, with its emphasis on sound-bites and abreviated content, I get the sense journalists are taking only the surface aspects of news and go with whoever they get the most from. Hence the double-standard with McCain; he provides them 'access' and so his version of events receives the wider coverage. "In-depth reporting" (ie examining the factual basis for anything) is more or less left by the wayside as a result lest the reporter get 'scooped' by more immediate developments.
The lack of incentives for reporters to pursue such fact-based reporting strikes more as an institutional failing than one on the part of either the public or the reporters themselves. With an over-emphasis on getting the most content out the fastest and loudest, reporters cannot help but seek what short-cuts are available to them so they don't get left behind. That they end up reporting nonsense or pushing non-existent controversy might not even occur to them before or after the fact.
True, there is some truly in-depth reporting going on (Seymour Hersch comes to mind), but that's more the exception than the rule and often gets lost in the shuffle. It doesn't help that the print media is on the downturn and increasingly distrusted thanks to its corporate tendencies.
In short, reporters appear to be seeking the path of least resistence when it comes to issues like Iran and the like, taking McCain at his word mainly because he can talk the fastest and trades on a mystique from his days in Vietnam. Similarly, pushing the Wright non-controversy ensures their name on the byline for awhile even as the fuller context of the story is left unexamined and receives far less exposure. They have no incentive, in the form of either greater exposure or increased standing, to do better than that.
Is there a solution to this? I've no idea. The public is a fickle creature and its attention span isn't the greatest; the American public it seems positively relishes this kind of idiocy, and the media is only too happy to oblige out of sheer self-interest.