They're at it again. Another story about Edwards' hair cut, another passive voice lament about the unending coverage the story is receiving.
In a story billed as an opportunity for "Edwards's Stylist Tells His Side of Story", John Solomon writes the following:
It is some kind of commentary on the state of American politics that as Edwards has campaigned for president, vice president and now president again, his hair seems to have attracted as much attention as, say, his position on health care. But when his campaign reported in April that it had paid for two of his haircuts at $400 each, the political damage was immediate. With each punch line on late night TV his image as a self-styled populist making poverty his signature issue was further eroded.
He then spends the next 1,000 or so words describing how badly the feelings of Edwards' hairstylist have been hurt by this entire episode.
I really don't understand why this is so hard for the people at the Washington Post to understand. Stories don't exist until they are written, and they are the people who write the stories. Moreover, because there is not an infinite amount of space in their newspaper, they are the people who choose which stories will be covered and which will be ignored. If a story is "attracting attention," it is only because, first, their own attention has been attracted, and second, they came to the conclusion that the story should be granted some of the very limited space that is in their newspaper. What appears in their paper is not an independent phenomenon.
In this case, Solomon, along with the editor's of the Post, have decided that a hairstylist's hurt feelings are national political news. At the same time, they have also decided that their decision is "some kind of commentary on the state of American politics." What kind of commentary, however, they will not say. Perhaps for Solomon's next piece they could get him to interview himself and find out.
UPDATE:: In a post on the narrative of the 2000 election, Ezra makes a very much related point:
...if the media hadn't been atoning for its own insecurities by constantly deriding Gore's wonkish pedantry while making Bush's inexperience and bluster seem like a sort of Heartland wisdom, the outcome might have been very different. It's not hard to imagine an election in which Bush's ignorance of policy became an overwhelmingly negative narrative in just the way Kerry's indecisiveness was. The media simply chose not to do things that way. After all, they know blustery, indecisive intellectuals, and dislike many of them. They don't know people who work on a ranch and don't crave their approval. And without some experience with such types, who are they to judge?
Like it or not, our major media organizations are the keepers of our national political narrative. In some cases, they are even its creators. And yet they act as if they are merely some sort of neutral mirror reflecting back to us the realities of the world. Ezra provides one potential explanation:
I wonder if the punditocracy's odd valuing of Republican personality traits isn't a sort of compensatory move for the chattering class's distaste for Republican policy ideas. If you want to be balanced, but think it's stupid to say that tax cuts raise revenues, you need to find some grounds on which to compliment Republicans.
So far as I can tell, these grounds tend to be that vaunted Heartland "authenticity" that journalistic elites are so acutely aware that they lack, or their apparent toughness, which journalistic elites are also acutely aware that they lack. The folks populating the Sunday shows think -- and are probably right in thinking -- that they know a helluva lot more about social policy than Fred Thompson. But they don't think they're tougher than him, or more of a Tennessean. So those are the ground on which he's complimented. And since journalist types don't know enough to judge the worth of such things, and are only lauding the qualities in the first place because they think the rubes like 'em (and what the rubes like has a talismanic power to those self-conscious about their class), they tend to mention those issues a lot, and do so utterly uncritically.
For pundits with actual policy experience, this explanation may well be true. For those without policy experience, however, I suspect the underlying explanation is far more simple. Knowing nothing about policy, they fall back on something they know all to well: image. And image isn't just something they know, its something they know that sells. What better to give the public than that?
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