When a Republican presidential candidate goes around talking about Barack Obama as the "food stamp president," eventually reporters are going to have to write about racism. But how they talk about the issue in instructive. In today's New York Times (1/18/12), Jim Rutenberg has a piece headlined "Risks for GOP in Attacks With Racial Themes," where we learn this about Newt Gingrich's food stamp rhetoric:

Mr. Gingrich was clearly making the case that he is the candidate most able to take the fight to Mr. Obama in the fall, but he was also laying bare risks for his party when it comes to invoking arguments perceived to carry racial themes or other value-laden attack lines.

This is the kind of language one expects to encounter when reporters have to figure out ways to talk about racism without calling it racism. In Monday's Times (1/16/12--Martin Luther King Jr. Day),  John Harwood reported on why several Republicans didn't pursue the presidential nomination:

Political heavyweights who declined to enter the 2012 race all had uniquely personal reasons. Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana faced family resistance; former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi feared being bogged down in the politics of race; Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey doubted his readiness for the Oval Office.

People who remember the Barbour story might not recall anything about a bog. Barbour talked to the Weekly Standard in late 2010, and he professed fond memories of the white supremacist Citizens Council groups in Mississippi. In Barbour's mind they were anti-Klan activists, which as critics pointed out, is a rather remarkable description of groups that were founded to oppose school integration and protest civil rights advocates.

That controversy brought up other unpleasant Barbour stories, like this anecdote from a 1982 New York Times article (dug up by Ben Smith at Politico) about Barbour's Congressional campaign:

But the racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be "coons" at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.

That the obvious racism on display is characterized as "racial sensitivity" suggests the Times hasn't changed a whole lot over the years.

One point that Rutenberg's piece today makes is that the pointed questions that were posed to Gingrich at the recent debate were asked by a black reporter: Fox's Juan Williams.  To Williams, there's nothing subtle about what Gingrich is doing here; it is  "more than a dog whistle.... It's a hoot and a holler."

It could be that journalists of color would be more likely to call out a candidate making these kinds of appeals.  That's less likely when there are few journalists of color covering the campaign. To take just one outlet as an example, Richard Prince recently noted in his Journal-isms column (1/4/12) that Time magazine does not have any blacks or Latinos covering the 2012 political season.

The usual criticisms of the Iowa caucuses--that the votes of a small, demographically unrepresentative slice of America gobble up too much airtime--are basically correct.

As David Sirota noted in Salon (1/3/12):

The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers' editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and eliminating every other critical topic not related to Washington's red-versus-blue fetish from news content--as writer Joe Romero recounts, this same industry has for months devoted a massive army to cover Iowa's small contest.

Just one example of the absurdity:  At least one of Rick Santorum's final campaign stops was so mobbed by reporters that some of actual residents of Iowa he was supposed to be talking to couldn't squeeze into the meetings, as noted by the Washington Post:

The evidence of Santorum's recent surge was obvious: The overwhelming crush of media members at the Polk City stop included reporters from Italy and Australia. Dozens of voters--who two weeks ago probably could have had the candidate to themselves--were pressed out of the restaurant and stood in the cold.

"I'm actually from Polk City," one said to another as he was unable to squeeze his way inside. "Yeah, we don't count," the other responded.

Of the storylines that have emerged so far, one is that Mitt Romney has yet to dominate the competition. This has been present in the campaign coverage for months, and continued in the papers this morning.  Susan Page in USA Today wrote:

By favoring a conservative, a moderate and a libertarian in nearly equal doses, visitors to the state's 1,774 precincts did little to clear up what has been a topsy-turvy contest to choose President Obama's opponent next fall.

In the New York Times, Jeff Zeleny writes that "Mitt Romney's quest to swiftly lock down the Republican presidential nomination with a commanding finish in the Iowa caucuses was undercut on Tuesday night by the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum." And Zeleny added later,  "The Iowa caucuses did not deliver a clean answer to what type of candidate Republicans intend to rally behind to try to defeat President Obama and win back the White House."

Also in the Times, courtesy of Jim Rutenberg:

But more than anything else, the Iowa caucuses cast in electoral stone what has played out in the squishy world of polls and punditry for the last 12 months: The deep ideological divisions among Republicans continue to complicate their ability to focus wholly on defeating President Obama, and to impede Mr. Romney's efforts to overcome the internal strains and win the consent if not the heart of the party.

There is no reason in the world that voters in any state in the country should line up behind any single candidate. The fact that the voters in a particular party are split between different candidates who represent different factions of their party is a sign that people have different views about who they think should lead the country. Which is, after all, a good thing.

The alternative would be to deprive voters everywhere else a chance to have a say about who their party's nominee will be. There's a curious sort of tension at work. On the one hand, you get a sense that reporters want the primary season to continue for months, if only for the sake of giving them something to cover. On the other hand, they spend an awful lot of time puzzling over why Mitt Romney can't manage to wrap up the Republican nomination after one state has voted.

Is Fox News Channel going soft? In an election year? Some media figures seem to think the hard-right channel is going to the "middle," but this seems to be a figment of the centrist imagination.

New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman has a short piece trying to make this case. His first bit of evidence is that  Fox granted backstage access at its recent Republican debate to a New York Times reporter--as Sherman put it, "Fox's decision to allow Times scribe Jim Rutenberg into the building to confront the candidates in person." That sounds rather aggressive, and Sherman sees this as some sort of political shift:

That "sweating" session was a debate moderated by three Republican attorneys general, who are in some ways to the right of some of the candidates--particularly Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Given that the conservative base of the Republican party seems to have questions about the ideological commitment of these two--especially Romney--the fact that Fox convened a debate where the candidates had to field questions from the right doesn't really seem like playing to the "center."

Sherman argues:

You may have heard that Barack Obama shared some thoughts about Fox News Channel in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. When asked about the channel, Obama pointed out that media outlets with a political perspective have been relatively common throughout U.S. history, but that he believed Fox's perspective is "ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class."

The New York Times' Jim Rutenberg had a piece (10/2/10) on Fox's political activism this year--particularly News Corp's million-dollar donations to the Republican Governors' Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But Fox's response to Obama's criticism of the network gets the last word in the piece--in the form of an anonymous source:

An executive at Fox News who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity expressed "astonishment" over Mr. Obama's focus on the network. "We are so in his head," he said. "Can you believe with all the other things going on in this world he's preoccupied with Fox News?"

The Times--mostly in the wake of the Iraq War/Judith Miller debacles--attempted to clamp down on the use of anonymous sources. But such sourcing patterns persist. Former Times public editor critiqued the paper on these failures a few times, in one case (3/21/09) pointing to specfic rules that would seem to apply here:

The policy says anonymous sources should be used only as "a last resort when the story is of compelling public interest and the information is not available any other way."

And:

The policy says the newspaper will not allow personal or partisan attacks from behind a mask of anonymity.

Rutenberg's piece seems to fail on both those counts. You learn nothing of real value from the anonymous Fox source, and it would seem to constitute an attack of some sort, since the Fox executive is saying that Obama is "preoccupied" with Fox News instead of dealing with more important matters.

The New York Times' Jim Rutenberg had a follow-up piece on Friday's debate headlined "The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won." The story described the McCain and Obama camps' attempts at "influencing the public perception of who won an encounter that produced no clear winner or loser."

Except--is it really true that the debate produced no clear winner? The initial polls pointed to Obama as a winner; CNN's poll released Friday night found that 51 percent of respondents thought Obama had done a better job, vs. 38 percent for McCain. CBS's Friday night poll of undecided voters had 40 percent calling Obama the winner, 22 percent saying McCain. Clearly, "winning" a presidential debate means improving your chances of getting elected, so polls of the public would appear to offer the best evidence of who "won."

Rutenberg alludes to these polls, yet dismisses them: "Mr. Obama appeared to have an edge in the various snap polls taken the night of the debate, though these are notoriously unreliable," Rutenberg wrote in the second half of the 18th paragraph--his only mention of polling data.

It's not clear how the polls immediately after a debate are "unreliable" gauges of who the public thought won that debate; while polling has its limitations, surely it's more accurate than pundits' speculations about who the electorate would think the winner would be. A less time-pressed USA Today/Gallup poll taken the day after the debate, and probably not available to Rutenberg before his deadline, confirmed the results of the "flash" polls: 39 percent said Obama won vs. 28 percent for McCain; among those who actually watched the debate, it was 46 percent Obama vs. 34 percent McCain.

But for Rutenberg, the public's own response seems to be rather beside the point; his story is about "campaigns go[ing] full-bore to convince the news media, and ultimately the public, that their candidate won," since it's "a common belief in presidential politics" that "many viewers base their judgment not necessarily on debate performance but on what they read and see in the days afterward."

In other words, it's the media's job to tell the public whom they thought won the debate.