A source many of the mainstream sites linked to in their initial coverage of Hillary’s MLK comment was Fox News’s Major Garrett’s Blog—The Bourbon Room, it’s called—in which he trumpets his interview with Clinton and, in so doing, incorrectly characterizes her treatment of Dr. King:

Clinton also said Obama and Edwards have acted like hypocrites during the race and appeared to diminish the role Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movements, saying it wasn’t hope that King inspired that made the difference but President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to fight for and sign the Civil Rights Act into law.

Let’s leave aside the questionable logic that to acknowledge Johnson’s role in the civil rights movement is to diminish Dr. King’s. Instead, let’s go back to the game of Telephone—and, specifically, its most basic law: that, when the first person to hear and spread the word misinterprets that word, there’s no recovering. The “Clinton diminishing Dr. King’s role” narrative caught on, with her words—taken out of context—used to reinforce it. The Politico’s Ben Smith continued the misinterpretation, calling Clinton’s comment, last week, “an odd example for the argument between rhetoric and action.” Then others got in on the action: Rep. James Clyburn, South Carolina’s most prominent African-American elected official, accused Clinton of denigrating Dr. King and the civil rights movement. “We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” he told The New York Times.

Then came the Spin, which the media happily filtered. Bill Clinton guested on Al Sharpton’s and Roland Martin’s radio shows. Clinton’s supporters filled the airwaves. So did Obama’s. Michelle Obama, speaking at the Trumpet Awards in Atlanta, decried Bill’s supposed likening of her husband’s candidacy to a “fairy tale” (more on that in a minute). Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) defended Clinton on “Hardball.”
John Edwards, in a feat of rhetoric befitting a trial lawyer, managed to raise not one, but two middle fingers in Clinton’s general direction as he connected Fairytalegate and MLK-gate in an interview:

“I must say I was troubled recently to see a suggestion that real change came not through the Rev. Martin Luther King, but through a Washington politician. I fundamentally disagree with that. Those who believe that real change starts with Washington politicians have been in Washington too long—and are living in a fairy tale.”

Hillary herself, facing the one-man-firing-squad that was Tim Russert, tried to explain the comment on Sunday’s Meet the Press:

Dr. King didn’t just give speeches. He marched, he organized, he protested, he was gassed, he was beaten, he was jailed. He understood that he had to move the political process and bring in those who were in political power, and he campaigned for political leaders including Lyndon Johnson, because he wanted somebody in the White House who would act on what he had devoted his life to achieving.”

It’s a tricky thing to argue about your maltreatment by the press when, up to a couple weeks ago, you’d been christened by that same press corps as the foregone conclusion for the Democratic nomination. But it’s a trickier thing to have your admiration for a civil rights movement hero go from taken-for-granted to needing-articulation. Or, as Salon’s Walter Shapiro put it, “It is never a good sign when a Democratic candidate feels compelled to stress, ‘Dr. King …is one of the people I admire most in the world.’”

The whole affair, more than anything else, is incredibly sad. The two leading candidates of the party that, right now, seems to have the momentum going into the national election will, whoever wins the nomination, make history. We should be thrilled. We should be proud. But the past week’s “racial overtones” coverage reminds us that, however much our political universe has progressed, our media universe is still often one of ‘(sound) bite first, ask questions later.’

Perhaps lessons are being learned, though, if after the fact. The other story in all this—Bill Clinton’s “fairy tale” line in reference to Obama—was similarly taken out of context. (In short, Clinton was referring to Obama’s Iraq-war voting record, not his candidacy overall; for a longer, and great, summary, see the HuffPo’s Rachel Sklar’s analysis, here.) In what seems to be a tacit nostra culpa, MSNBC’s coverage yesterday did an entire segment on Obama’s war-voting record, carefully highlighting the Bill Clinton quote in context. NPR ran a similar piece this morning.

Today is Dr. King’s birthday; he would have been 79. And in today’s articles about the truce between two candidates whose candidacy would likely have made Dr. King proud of the progress he helped to invoke, the relief on the part of those describing that truce is nearly palpable. After a week of bickering, of he-said-she-said-they-said and back-and-forth, even the drama-loving press corps seems sick of it.

• 1
• 2