Media Tougher On...

CBS News posted a wide ranging interview with Mark Penn over the weekend. While they did indeed cover a lot of ground in this interview, I wanted to focus on one particular part of the interview here.

CBSNews.com: Your former colleague Howard Wolfson argued that you all unintentionally paved the way for Palin by exposing some of the unfair media coverage that Hillary Clinton received. And, therefore, a lot of the media may now be treating Sarah Palin with kid gloves. Do you agree with that?

Mark Penn: Well, no, I think the people themselves saw unfair media coverage of Senator Clinton. I think if you go back, the polls reflected very clearly what "Saturday Night Live" crystallized in one of their mock debates about what was happening with the press.

I think here the media is on very dangerous ground. I think that when you see them going through every single expense report that Governor Palin ever filed, if they don't do that for all four of the candidates, they're on very dangerous ground. I think the media so far has been the biggest loser in this race. And they continue to have growing credibility problems.

And I think that that's a real problem growing out of this election. The media now, all of the media — not just Fox News, that was perceived as highly partisan — but all of the media is now being viewed as partisan in one way or another. And that is an unfortunate development.

CBSNews.com: So you think the media is being uniquely tough on Palin now?

Mark Penn: Well, I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they're not doing on the other candidates. And that's going to subject them to people concluding that they're giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, "Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time."

What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them.

Emphasis mine. The media swarm on Alaska (which I hear rivaled the late August mosquito swarms and were just as welcome) only managed to dig up the fact that when Sarah Palin took office she (gasp) fired the appointees of her predecessor who just happened to be a tiny bit corrupt and hire people she knew and trusted! Of course that didn't prevent some of them from breathlessly implying that there was something to be concerned about.

While I would caution that you take a lot of what Penn says at face value (he is a long time adviser to both former President Clinton and Senator Clinton) it is still one of those interviews that you should read in its entirety because it offers a lot of insight into this leg of the campaign.