Media promise better coverage of 2020 -all I got was Kirsten Gillibrand fried chicken

**dukkha** · 02-13-2019, 11:28 PM

Poor Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. The Democratic New York senator, now a 2020 White House hopeful, entered the race practically glowing with the current zeitgeist of today’s Democratic Party, the angry women who marched in the millions after President Trump was inaugurated in 2017 and converted that energy into a Democratic House majority last November.

But Gillibrand has struggled to gain traction in the ever-growing, just-list-who-isn’t-running field of Democratic candidates. Some of that might be rooted in concern over how the upstate New Yorker morphed from a pro-gun centrist into an avatar of the Trump Resistance, and that’s a valid question. But that’s not exactly how the journalists following the 2020 race framed any doubts over Gillibrand’s viability over the weekend. Instead, they presented voters with #FriedChickenGate.

The political trope about the candidate awkwardly gobbling down ethnic food is as old as pastrami itself, probably dating back to the penny press ripping John Adams for the way he gnawed on a fried possum. OK, I made that up, but I’m not making up how reporters parlayed any serious coverage of how a President Gillibrand might get us out of the giant mess that’s been created at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into an analysis of what happened when she met African-American leaders at a joint called Kiki’s Chicken and Waffles in the critical early-primary state of South Carolina.

The fact that Gillibrand started eating her chicken with a knife and fork, but then switched to her fingers after noting that all her companions were using their hands, wasn’t portrayed as the natural awkwardness that every sentient human being has felt at some social gathering where messy could-be finger food like greasy chicken or slathered barbecued ribs is on the table. No, the moment was a Grand Metaphor for a candidate who was “contrived,” who changed her stance on the Fried Chicken Question just like she’d changed her position on amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

**dukkha** · 02-13-2019, 11:33 PM

After the shock of President Trump’s November 8, 2016, victory, many leaders in the news business promised a major examination of what went wrong — but from Day One there seemed to be confusion over what was actually meant by “wrong.”
The publisher of the New York Times, which sits atop the American news pyramid, issued a much-discussed quasi-apology that seemed largely a mea culpa for ignoring Trump voters (thus, 774*-and-counting reports from tobacco-spit-stained diners in southern Ohio); remarkably the Paper of Record has never apologized for a) the day shortly before the election when it treated an ultimately inconsequential thing about those damned emails like the Second Coming of Watergate or b) the story also right before the election that falsely claimed the FBI had uncovered no Trump-Russia ties (when it actually had).

Generally, there were vague promises — in line with the media’s post-Trump “Democracy Dies in Darkness” pronouncements — that campaign coverage would be more serious and less hijack-able by trivia once the 2020 race got underway. But that moment has now arrived, and it looks like the same people are covering this presidential election — with the same tired bag of tricks.

The most egregious case, in my opinion, has been the coverage of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who wasn’t just the first Democrat to announce for 2020 but so far has been the boldest when it comes to both diagnosing how American got into this jam and prescribing actual solutions. Warren has charged head-on into the loaded-yet-critical issue of income inequality with proposals like a wealth tax on multi-millionaires and billionaires and legislation that would force big corporations to be held accountable.

But is she, you know, “likable”? That was the bizarre question that hung over the first days of the Warren campaign (inspired, presumably, by the notion that 2016 voters rejected a qualified woman because they didn’t like her and you can’t change the voters not matter how misogynistic they are, so you should kowtow to them by changing your candidate) only to be supplanted by the endless controversy over her apparently minor-level DNA of Native American heritage.
https://www.philly.com/opinion/comme...-20190212.html

**anonymoose** · 02-14-2019, 12:00 AM

Reality: most get their news when they open their browsers at their work desk. The articles that get the most clicks sell the most ads. Occasional-Cortex looniness and ant-Trump articles get the most clicks. Nothing will change.