Not a new premise, but Jamison Foser calls bullshit on the media, in the wake of the tabloid-style expose this week in the NYT (which led me to unsubscribe to their email alerts and demand my account be scrubbed from their database).
What was new to me was the info on Bush’s questionable stock sale that never got attention when he was running in 2000. Gee, how convenient was that!
Throughout this article is the use of the word “progressive” as an antonym for conservative, a much broader definition than I use, but looking at the Wikipedia entry, perhaps it is I who is wrong. Hillary Clinton is a liberal only because the political landscape leans so far to the right. I consider her, at best, a centrist Democrat. If she is a “progressive” then what is Russ Feingold? What is Cindy Sheehan? What is Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky?
But if the media are going to put candidates’ personal lives on the table, it’s time they do so for all candidates. If common decency and the shame that should accompany behaving like voyeuristic 10th-graders aren’t enough to convince the David Broders and Chris Matthewses and Tim Russerts of the world that the Clintons marriage is none of their damn business — or ours — then basic fairness dictates that they treat Republican candidates the same way. Because the only thing worse than a bunch of reporters peering into bedroom windows of candidates is a bunch of reporters peering into the bedroom windows of only one party’s candidates.
Joe Conason on the NYT fp-ing Clinton gossip.