cross-posted at skippy and a veritable cornucopia of other community blogs.
mediabloodhound is following the story of how abc news is continuously giving the shaft to dennis “the menace” kucinich, and how other media outlets are enabling them to do so:
following last sunday’s democratic presidential debate on abc news’ this week with george stephanopoulos, dennis kucinich’s campaign asked abc news to address issues it had with treatment rep. kucinich (d-ohio) received both during the debate and afterward in abc’s online coverage. in an email sent out to supporters on wednesday, the campaign said it “submitted objections and inquiries to abc news representatives on monday and tuesday. abc news representatives have failed to respond – or even acknowledge – those objections and inquiries.” i confirmed with the kucinich campaign yesterday that it has subsequently been forwarded the same response abc news executive director andrea jones sent to the washington post and time magazine.
abc news representatives felt it necessary to answer the kucinich campaign’s objections when time magazine’s national political correspondent karen tumulty queried them. writing on the time blog swampland, tumulty initially says of the kucinich team’s issues with abc’s treatment (which included kucinich not having a chance to speak until 28 minutes into the debate), “these all seemed like fair complaints to me, so i asked abc news to respond.” then tumulty says, “in an e-mail, executive director andrea jones answered him [kucinich] point by point.”
while i give tumulty credit for contacting abc news, her investigative journalism unfortunately ends there. once she receives the email from jones, tumulty slips into stenography mode. jones’ “point by point” response to the kucinich campaign’s complaints does not in itself exculpate or dispel any of abc’s wrongdoing. tumulty fails to assess the accuracy and logic of jones’ answers.
first, just so we’re all up to speed, here are the issues (an aggregate of the thousands of complaints received during and after abc’s debate coverage) that the kucinich campaign asked abc news to address:
- congressman kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a “politics page” photo of the candidates.
- sometime monday afternoon, after congressman kucinich took a commanding lead in abc’s own on-line “who won the democratic debate” survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website.
- abc news has not officially reported the results of its online survey.
- after the results of that survey showed congressman kucinich winning handily, abc news, sometime monday afternoon, replaced the original survey with a second survey asking “who is winning the democratic debate?”
- during the early voting monday afternoon and evening, u.s. senator barack obama was in the lead. by sometime late monday or early tuesday morning, congressman kucinich regained the lead by a wide margin in this second survey.
- sometime tuesday morning, abc news apparently dropped the second survey from prominence or killed it entirely.
- and, as every viewer of the nationally televised sunday presidential forum is aware, congressman kucinich was not given an opportunity to answer a question from moderator george stephanopoulos until 28 minutes into the program.
now back to tumulty commenting on jones’ response [emphasis below is mine]:
this gist of her answer is this: she denies that kucinich was cropped out of any photo, noting that “there are 20 photos live on the abc news website, mr. kucinich is in a number of them and there is even one of him and his wife. he is one of 6 candidates who got his own photo in the slide show. as for the images, clearly nothing was cropped, the image in question was shot by charlie neibergall of the ap not abc.”
false. had tumulty – time magazine’s national political correspondent and former member of the white house press corps – simply located the original ap photo (which, at most, should’ve taken a few minutes online), she would’ve found kucinich in it and realized the following version abc news prominently displayed online after the debate had, indeed, been cropped:
you’ll have to go to mediabloodhound to see the image, we don’t want to steal their bandwidth.
but we also recommend you read the entire article; mediabloodhound has done a yeoman’s job of detailing the many ways that abc is shafting kucinich, and time and washpost are simply acting as yes-men for the network when asked to investigate this issue (such as how the washpost characterized kucinich as “irate,” when congressman was no such thing, but merely asking for an accounting of his obviously short-shrifted treatment by the network. washpost didn’t even bother to contact kucinich or anyone on his campaign before writing the story).
action alert addendum: why not write to these multi-millionaire media outlets and let them know how disengenuous their coverage of rep. kucinich is?
here’s the contact page for this week w/george snuffleupagus. here’s an email for blogs at the washpost. here’s the time swampland post. here’s the sleuth (mary ann akers) at the washpost (her original post about kucinich has closed comments).
