Beaver Patrol

The New York City Police Department SCUBA team took time off from their assigned task of guarding Pope Benedict to chase beaver - in the East River. No, really, they did.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York police guarding the United Nations during Pope Benedict's visit on Friday made a rare discovery and rescue — of a beaver struggling to swim past the world body's headquarters.
 
Soon after the pope left the United Nations, police harbour and scuba units patrolling the East River spotted the four-foot (1.20 metre) long, 40-pound (18-kg) animal. Beavers have only recently returned to the city with the first sighting of one in more than 200 years made in February 2007.

We had no idea how dedicated the NYPD was to chasing beaver, but we have known enough cops in our time to be unsurprised by this. We were surprised that New York City was a hot spot for beaver, however. We thought that was only a Canadian problem.

Professional De Attachment

The Politico notes just how badly the media is in danger this year of losing professional credibility. Reporters have become, in many cases, sycophants of Barack Obama - more so even than they have in previous years with other politicians. John Harris and Jim Vanderhei describe reporters having to go through detox after a brief assignment of covering Barack Obama on the campaign trail.

Last fall, when NBC’s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions—a mix of fair and impertinent—he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.

But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC’s performance as journalistically unsound.

The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: Preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading.

This is not to say that ABC’s performance was flawless. There were some weird questions (“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”). There were some questionable production decisions (the camera cutaways to Chelsea Clinton, the stacking of so many process questions in the first 45 minutes.)

But there was nothing to justify Tom Shales’s hyperbolic review (“shoddy, despicable performances” by Gibson and Stephanopoulos) in the Washington Post or Greg Mitchell’s in Editor & Publisher (“perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years.”) Others, like Time’s Michael Grunwald, likewise weighed in against ABC.

In fact, the balance of political questions (15) to policy questions (13) was more substantive than other debates this year that prompted no deluge of protests. The difference is that this time there were more hard questions for Obama than for Clinton.

Moreover, those questions about Jeremiah Wright, about Obama’s association with 1960s radical William Ayers, about apparent contradictions between his past and present views on proven wedge issues like gun control, were entirely in-bounds. If anything they were overdue for a front-runner and likely nominee.

If Obama was covered like Clinton is, one feels certain the media focus would not have been on the questions, but on a candidate performance that at times seemed tinny, impatient, and uncertain.

The difference seems clear: Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.

(Harris only here: As one who has assigned journalists to cover Obama at both Politico and the Washington Post, I have witnessed the phenomenon several times. Some reporters come back and need to go through de-tox, to cure their swooning over Obama’s political skill. Even VandeHei seemed to have been bitten by the bug after the Iowa caucus.)

(VandeHei only here: There is no doubt reporters are smitten with Obama's speeches and promises to change politics. I find his speeches, when he's on, pretty electric myself. It certainly helps his cause that reporters also seem very tired of the Clintons and their paint-by-polls approach to governing.)

Thus far, the media has managed to report on Obama's gaffes, but has not kept up the drumbeat of negative stories that would normally hound a candidate - especially a Republican one. I suspect most people can see the way the media is treating Obama with kid gloves - and the media will pay a price in the long run for that. Harris and Vanderhei do not seem to think the media is the main cause of the rise of Obama, but I suspect it has a lot to do with it. Reporters are playing softball with Obama while playing a death match with Clinton.

While the attachment of many in the media for Obama may be more pronounced this year than in the past, I honestly don't think it is much different than it has been in past years for others. Bill Clinton would have been hounded from office by the press if he had been a Republican. The difference now is that people do have alternatives to the old media and the bias is even easier to see. Harris and Vanderhei are quite right to be worried by this. So should all Americans, regardless of political affiliation. While Obama supporters may think this is just great right now, they should be thinking about the inevitable backlash that is bound to happen.