Check out the lede to this story in today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal:
“A chief strategist for John Kerry’s campaign said Tuesday that the political winds of change in Nevada have shifted toward the Democratic presidential candidate.”
So a Kerry aide says he thinks things look good for Kerry in Nevada. Does that sound like news to you? It doesn’t to us, either.
As if that weren’t enough, the Review-Journal devotes the next two paragraphs to more of the aide’s naked pro-Kerry spin:
Mark Mellman, a pollster retained by the Kerry campaign, said Kerry’s lead in several national polls shows his candidate to be in “extraordinary position” with 131 days left until the election, especially in 17 battleground states.
“There are national issues and there are local issues, and nationally when people say they think (President) Bush misled the American people on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that reinforces the view people in Nevada have about Yucca Mountain,” Mellman said in a telephone interview after a conference call.
What’s depressing here is that, as campaign spin goes, Mellman’s attempt to link WMD to Yucca Mountain is pretty clumsy. But not so clumsy that the Review-Journal didn’t eat it up.
And it gets worse. Not until 12 paragraphs later are readers given a piece of information that eviscerates the premise in the story’s lede: “Mellman did not discuss any Nevada-specific numbers Tuesday.”
Figuring out what’s going on here isn’t rocket science. It’s not every day that reporters from local outlets like the Journal-Review get invited to participate in conference calls with John Kerry’s pollster, and then get the chance to conduct a follow-up one-on-one phone interview. So when they do, they’re a little excited. And they tend to assign news value to any comment they get.
Both campaigns know this, and are skilled at taking advantage of it. That’s why the press should remember: The fact that you heard something from the campaign usually makes it less newsworthy, not more.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.