Terry Cowgill

Too Much $$$$ ?

September 29, 2007 on 7:30 am | In Local, Main, Media, Race for Prez |

A friend (and an activist Republican) recently asked me the following:

Why when the Republicans were out raising Democrats was there an overwhelming media meme that there is “too much money in politics.” But now that the Dems are out raising the Republicans, there is little or no concern on the part of the “watchdogs of the public?” Just asking …

A fair question, albeit a rhetorical one. Most members of the MSM are either Democrats or independents sympathetic to Dems. Polls over the years have borne this out.

There are exceptions, to be sure. Locally, there are a couple of scribes I know who worked for big media and who come immediately to mind: One guy who wrote for Newsweek and another for the NYT. Both are somewhat conservative- or libertarian-leaning. And our LJ newsroom has a nice mix of writers and editors with diverse worldviews. But for every righty I’ve met in journalism, there have been at least two lefties.

Moreover, reporters love a good story and nothing fills the bill better than the haves vs the have-nots. You know, it’s the old maxim that the job of a newspaper should be to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Recently, I suspect it’s one of the reasons the Boston Globe picked up so swiftly on the story of those two disappointed inner-city football recruits who were turned away from Salisbury School at the last minute. It fits the template: hardscrabble kids get screwed by elite private school.

And note the language of the Globe reporter, describing Salisbury as “an elite boarding academy” with “a leafy campus”; the two recruits, on the other hand, were yearning to be “free from the soundtrack of gunfire and police sirens in their gang-ridden neighborhoods.” For a reporter inclined to this sort of thing, it’s a narrative that almost writes itself.

So to answer your question, old buddy, there’s no great hue and cry in the media about money in politics now for the same reason the booming Reagan years were “the decade of greed” while the equally booming Clinton years were … what? “Good for America?”