The narrative

Kevin Drum on the terrible media coverage of the wingnut wack jobs:

There are several things going on here, all of them related:

• As Ornstein says, once a campaign narrative gets locked in stone, it guides all subsequent coverage, regardless of whether it really fits all the facts.
• For some reason, conservatives get a pass for holding wacky views unless they do it in a particularly boorish way (see Akin, Todd). When they chatter about, say, the Agenda 21 plot to take over our neighborhoods, it’s taken as little more than a routine show of tribal affiliation, not a genuine belief in nutball conspiracy theories.
• More generally, campaign reporters simply don’t care about policy. It’s boring, and anyway, commenting on it tacitly suggests that they’re taking sides. So they write about it as little as they can.
• The flip side of this is that campaign reporters are smitten with campaign strategy. Far from being disgusted by candidates who successfully hide their real views, they consider it a sign of savvy. Only bright-eyed idiots tell voters the truth about themselves.

And so we end up with puff pieces about Ernst’s folksiness and repeated coverage of Bruce Braley’s chicken battles. Agenda 21, personhood, privatizing Social Security, and other far-right hot buttons get buried by the simple expedient of Ernst refusing to talk to reporters about them and then being rewarded for it by reporters who admire her “control” of the press.

Obviously Ernst isn’t my cup of tea, but if the citizens of Iowa want to send a right-wing loon to the Senate—well, it’s their state. As long as they do it with their eyes open, they should go right ahead. But if they send a far-right loon to the Senate because they mistakenly think she’s actually a cheerful, pragmatic centrist, that’s not so OK. And if the press is helping her put over this charade, the press ought to take a good, long look in the mirror. They don’t need to take sides, but they do need to tell the truth.

H/t Attorney Karin Riley Porter.