Bill Clinton Is Right About Campaign Coverage

"No wonder people think experience is irrelevant. A lot of people covering the race think it is." -- Bill Clinton, December 4, 2007.

He might be the former president of the United States, but when Bill Clinton dared critique the press for the vacuous way it covers campaigns, he got smacked down by the media elites who unleashed their contempt and, fittingly, misstated what Clinton had said.

Such is the state of affairs where, as Clinton noted, campaign issues have faded so far in the rearview mirror for the press that they've dipped below the horizon. What's worse is not only has the press shifted into hyper-horserace mode where tactics reign, but lots of media players can't even do the horserace stuff right. Bloomberg's Al Hunt displayed that nicely with a recent tactics-only campaign column where he mangled a key fact in order to prop up his favorite narrative.

Actually, I don't think 'horserace' accurately describes the type of campaign coverage from this cycle. What we're seeing flourish this time on the trail is something else entirely. It's coverage that's often saddled with inane trivia about tactics and delivered with a faux breathlessness, in a way that traditional horserace coverage never was.

I'm almost nostalgic for the days when the press paid too much attention to campaign consultants since at least those dispatches had some substance to them. This is a new, more disturbing (immature?) brand of pseudo-journalism that's delivered with an extra dose of attitude and that informs and enlightens even less. And in recent weeks, Democratic front-runners Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY), former Sen. John Edwards (NC), and Sen. Barack Obama (IL) have all suffered at its hands.

Let's start with the former POTUS and the instructive episode that unfolded after he accurately bemoaned the lack of substance from the campaign media. It happened in New Hampshire, during a stop at Keene State College where Clinton made reference to a recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that found very little press attention was being paid to issues.

"One percent of the press coverage was devoted to their record in public life," said President Clinton. "No wonder people think experience is irrelevant. A lot of the people covering the race think it is (irrelevant)."

He added: "Sixty-seven percent of the coverage is pure politics. That stuff has a half life of about 15 seconds. It won't matter tomorrow. It is very vulnerable to being slanted and rude. And it won't affect your life."

The comments seemed reasonable enough, but the next morning, ABCNews.com's The Note, the proud protector of the Beltway CW, lashed out:

This time [Clinton's] complaining about the media coverage -- surely, if reporters just paid more attention to wife's record, she'd be handed the nomination on the silver platter her husband thinks she deserves. "One percent of the press coverage was devoted to their record in public life," the former president said.

(We can think of two ways to get the press to focus more on Sen. Clinton's record. The first has to do with a couple million documents sealed away in Little Rock. The other has to do with not allowing the would-be "first laddie" anywhere near the trail -- or, at least, anywhere near the commission of news on the trail.)

First, don't you just love the condescending tone, as The Note lectures the former president (aka the "laddie") and one of the leading Democratic candidates on how to run the campaign after one of them had the audacity to question the campaign coverage.

Secondly, The Note, still clinging to the Whitewater narrative of the '90s, is convinced there's a treasure trove of juicy Clinton material buried in a mysterious mound of paperwork, and that if reporters could just get their hands on it they could finally tell the real Clinton story.