Important news from Nedra Pickler

In an AP story today, Nedra Pickler offers this fascinating critique of John Kerry's speaking style -- when he says the line "I've got your back," he doesn't sound enough like a football player in the huddle:

Kerry's style is illustrated by a story he's been telling recently on the campaign trail about a woman who sent a message to him through one of his staffers: "Tell the senator we've got his back."

Kerry delights in this casual phrase, a grin bursting on his face when he tells it, and he throws it back at his audiences at nearly every stop. "I've got YOUR back," he says.

But there's a formality in the way that Kerry speaks, even when he's saying something as casual as this. He says the phrase slowly and carefully pronounces each word, so it doesn't sound like it would if it came from a friend or a teammate who made the promise in a huddle.

Thanks Nedra! That's some great reporting.

In an equally depressing turn of events, the Times voter guide section today is filled with gauzy, useless profiles focusing on the candidates' personalities and styles, and the spin watch article and policy comparison table are buried inside.

This bring us back to the fundamental problem with political reporters: most of them would rather be campaign staffers or psychoanalysts than journalists. They love to pontificate about strategy and the candidate's innermost thoughts at great length, even though they know little about either. And they skimp on the reporting of hard facts and policy that's supposedly their job.

Maureen Dowd, this is all your fault...

Comments

[eric]

Funny, I always thought the reference was military in origin, rather than sport.

[howard]

well, maybe not all of maureen's fault, but enough is.

how nedra pickler still has a job, though, is beyond me; at least dowd is, once in a while, funny.

[Mark T]

I think the Media's obsession with style over substance, or with the supposed innermost thoughts or intuitive aspects of the candidates rather than the deeper factual aspects of their policy positions or qualitatively vetting who is right and who is wrong as charges of lying or exaggerating are made, is that the latter actually involves work and effort, whereas anybody can pontificate on the unknowable with minimal effort. Somewhere along the way, the 4th Estate has abdicated its role of reporting deductive matters in favor of divining the intuitive -- presumably because nobody can prove a conclusion about something entirely intuitive and subjective to be false (after all, it is intuitive and subjective) whereas a reporter who screws up on the facts is actually putting his or her career at risk because facts can be verified or proven wrong. I guess this is just another manifestation of the trend toward the media pandering to the short attention span of the viewing public. I guess both the reporters and the public share the blame for the deterioration of "quality" in the press.