With no precincts reporting, the AP is projecting that name-calling has won the 2010 election. From a piece headlined “Insults abound in 2010 campaigns:”
Name-calling is a winner this campaign season. By a landslide…
Political insults are as old as America itself, morphing into ever-new forms as television, the Internet, bloggers and Twitter replaced more technologically primitive forms of communication.Then, as now, they were intended to render a target loathsome…
But as the technology has become less primitive, name-calling seems more so.
Instead of attacking a politician’s views, many critics now choose to call the politician names and leave it at that.
And the AP chooses to write up some of those names… and leave it at that.
Like, readers learn that “Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum recently referred in a statement to his Republican rival for governor as ‘career fraudster Rick Scott.’” And, “Arizona Sen. John McCain aired an ad not long ago calling GOP primary opponent J.D. Hayworth ‘a huckster.’”
No details. Nothing about the significance, let alone the merits, if any. Just… the “insults.”
Also? “In Georgia, one Republican candidate for governor, Karen Handel, said the other [Nathan Deal] needed to “put on big boy pants.”
(Well, did he? A little help? Politifact? Anyone?)
With “crotch-kicker,” at least, the AP felt compelled to include a bit more context:
Then there’s Connecticut, and a statement the Democratic National Committee sent around referring to the Republican Senate candidate as Linda “crotch-kicker” McMahon. Asked about his choice of words, spokesman Brad Woodhouse said in an e-mail: “Well - her opponent ran that ad showing her doing it.” She is a former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment.
Very appropriate blog entry, Liz.
The AP is one to talk about name-calling. In dozens of reports every day, AP editors overuse negative modifiers (which just happen to agree with the views of supposedly "moderate" US policy-makers). A few examples: harsh, hard-line, far-left, far-right, extreme, violent. And here's one of my favorites: "violent Islamic militant Hamas group" (as if their political opponents, "moderate Fatah" -- or their sworn enemies, "the Israelis" -- are never violent or militant). By the way, these modifiers describe people or philosophies that challenge the imperial status quo, and that therefore deserve marginalizing, albeit in that famously "unbiased" (subtly State-worshiping) AP way.
#1 Posted by Dan, CJR on Wed 18 Aug 2010 at 02:34 PM
And here's one of the latest gems from the AP: Wikileaks' Julian Assange is a "self-styled' whistleblower. (http://apnews.myway.com//article/20100818/D9HM0NU01.html)
Was whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg merely "self-styled"? Or is this a manifestation of the AP's envy of a truly independent press entity? Perhaps the AP's inadequacy in fulfilling Tom Curley's stated duty ("we are the watchers") is becoming embarrassingly obvious, to the point where AP management senses the real danger of being exposed as the US government's largest (albeit unofficial) apologist.
#2 Posted by Dan, CJR on Wed 18 Aug 2010 at 03:14 PM