The Michele Bachmann presidential campaign--formerly treated as atop-tier juggernaut by Beltway media--has been floundering for weeks. Which makes right now as good a time as any for them to grab some headlines by shouting about liberal media bias.

The Bachmann campaign was furious about email correspondence concerning a possible Bachmann appearance on a CBS Web show after the Saturday night debate.  The network's political director, John Dickerson, was lukewarm on the idea, mentioning that Bachmann's poll numbers are quite low and that she wasn't likely to be much of a factor in the debate.  Even though Dickerson is correct, these are generally not good reasons to exclude candidates, as FAIR has argued over the years.

The value to the Bachmann campaign was pretty clear, as the New York Times reported today:

"Last night, as Michele prepared her plans to debate on CBS, we received concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows--the liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message," Keith Nahigian, Mrs. Bachmann's campaign manager, wrote in an e-mail to supporters.

Back in reality, Bachmann's message was still being suppressed on Sunday morning--as she appeared on NBC's Meet the Press to talk about her candidacy.

The truth is that the corporate media have been remarkably generous, granting Bachmann an extraordinary amount of coverage. And the CBS Sunday morning show Face the Nation, as FAIR noted here, has produced factcheck articles on its website after Bachmann has made appearances on the show--without ever telling its much larger viewing audience about her wildly inaccurate claims.

In case you missed it, Bachmann's Meet the Press appearance included, among other things, a call to make Iraq compensate the families of American servicemembers killed in the invasion of that country. A few million dollars would suffice.

It seems like just yesterday that Michele Bachmann was in the "top tier," thanks to her narrow victory in the mostly meaningless Iowa straw poll. She had "momentum." Then came this week's debate and, well, things are looking different. As the Washington Post described the scene at the debate:

Meanwhile, any momentum that Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), who won the Iowa straw poll in August, may have had from that victory has been extinguished by Perry.

The debates have been a forum in which Bachmann has shone, but she was sidelined on Wednesday night.

She was not asked a question until 14 minutes into the debate, and during an exchange on healthcare, she shouted for a chance to speak--only to be told that it was Huntsman's turn.

This should serve as a reminder that "momentum" in electoral politics is basically just how much attention media decide to grant a given candidate. Then when the press decide to pay less attention to your candidacy, they can observe that they had no choice--you lost your "momentum."

Washington Post ombud Patrick Pexton dedicated his column this weekend (8/29/11) to addressing complaints about the skimpy coverage of Republican presidential contender Ron Paul. It's hard to argue with the numbers he's gathered:

Still, the Post’s coverage of Paul looks thin compared with its stories on Bachmann. In the past six months, the Post has published online or in print 34 staff-written stories plus 12 wire service stories on Bachmann, who has served not even five years in the House, and that doesn't count the blog posts about her on the Fix or Glenn Kessler's Fact Checker pieces. The Post published 19 staff-written stories on former House speaker Newt Gingrich in that time, plus one wire story and many blog posts. On Paul, a congressman for more than 20 years, who was No. 2 in fundraising after Romney in the last report, the Post has published just three full stories, a couple more that had large sections on him along with other candidates, two wire stories and the Fix blog posts.

Bachmann has a 46-5 advantage over Paul--that's pretty stunning (and it doesn't even count Bachmann's appearances in the Fact Checker column, which is a place you're likely to read about her). A Post editor assures that more coverage of Paul is forthcoming, and that Gingrich got more coverage because his "campaign imploded when most of his senior staff walked out in June." You don't normally hear journalists talking about the need to thoroughly cover campaigns that are in complete disarray.

There is little reason to care about what the polls say right now about who's leading in the Republican presidential nomination. But the media obviously think otherwise, hence this headline in the Washington Post yesterday (8/25/11):

Romney Loses GOP Front-Runner Status

The "news" is that Rick Perry is leading in a new Gallup Poll. But read a little further:

The survey showed Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) at 13 percent and Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) slipping to 10 percent. No other candidate registered in the double digits.

So this means Paul's in the "top tier" now, right?

This is a good time to issue a quick reminder about the hazards of paying too much attention to early polling:

In 2003, early polling of the following year's Democratic nominees (e.g., CBS News poll, 12/14-12/16/03) showed eventual nominee John Kerry in the middle of the pack, trailing Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman. An August 2003 USA Today/Gallup poll (8/25-8/26/03) showed front-runner Lieberman with a 10-point lead over Gephardt. As the dynamics of the nomination race shifted, so did the polls--but not in a way that would suggest the polling would predict the winner. By January 2004, Howard Dean was leading the pack, followed closely by Wesley Clark (1/2-5/04).

On the Republican side:

in the 2000 race, Bush's only serious competition came from Sen. John McCain, who was trailing far behind in the early polls--behind Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle and Steve Forbes (e.g., NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 1/99).

One of the strangest comments post- Iowa straw poll came from reporter Kelly O'Donnell on NBC Nightly News (8/14/11):

Both Pawlenty's exit and Perry's launch consumed political oxygen that typically would have gone to the straw poll's actual winner, Congresswoman Bachmann, who appeared on all five Sunday morning talk shows, including Meet the Press.

I'm having trouble imagining how someone could put those two thoughts together. Bachmann was merely on five national TV shows Sunday morning. That's being overshadowed?

If that's oxygen deprivation, one has to wonder what you'd call the media treatment of Ron Paul, who finished one percentage point behind Bachmann, despite being treated as a non-candidate by the national media. Politico's Roger Simon  (8/15/11), argued that you can't say the straw poll means almost nothing and that Bachmann's victory makes her a top-tier candidate:

Straw polls are just organized bribery, with the campaigns buying the tickets and distributing them to supporters. (And, in fact, this is what I wrote before Ames.)

What they really show, many argue, is not where the philosophical heart of the party is, but the organizational abilities of the candidates.

Fine, I'll buy that. But why didn’t Paul get the same credit for his organizational abilities as Bachmann did for hers?

He points out that last time around finishing second was treated as a victory:

Four years ago, Mike Huckabee came in a bad second to Romney, losing by 13.4 percentage points. Huckabee managed to spin that into a victory at Ames and became a media darling.

But Paul almost wins the thing and he remains poison.

Simon's conclusion, though, is disappointing.  GOP operatives and officials were responsible for determining the winners/losers storyline:

So don’t blame the media. Here are Republicans, presumably Republican operatives, who said if one candidate wins, the contest is significant, but if another wins the contest is not credible.

That doesn't add up. Reporters don't have to take their marching orders from party operatives.

But if you want the definitive take-down of the corporate media's Paul-blocking top-tierism watch this segment from the Daily Show:

The right is apparently up in arms over this photo of Michele Bachmann that appears on the cover of this week's Newsweek:

If someone wants to say this is an unflattering picture, fine.

But Bachmann's supporters are unlikely to find much in Lois Romano's article to complain about. On the campaign trail, Bachmann's "simple, black-and-white distillations of complex problems are cheered as refreshing and tough." A campaign speech is a "folksy assault on a bloated federal government."

Explaining Bachmann's apparent surge, Romano writes:

Just months ago, Bachmann was the butt of jokes on late-night TV for her flawed grasp of U.S. history. But all that changed one night this spring when she took the stage at the first major GOP presidential debate with the middle-aged, drab men running for the nomination, and set herself apart with poise and precision. When others meandered or waffled, she shot back with answers that reduced Washington's dysfunctional gridlock to understandable soundbites.

I'm not sure comedians have stopped writing jokes about her-- or that her "grasp" of U.S. history has changed much since the spring. So much of the corporate media's enthusiasm for Bachmann comes down to cheering her performance at that one debate. People who watched it, or read the transcript afterwards, might have a hard time reconciling the upbeat characterizations of Bachmann's performance with the actual words she spoke from the stage.

As we pointed out, her  answer on jobs, the biggest political question of the moment, was a call to close down the Environmental Protection Agency, which she said should be called  the "Job-Killing Organization of America." Was that "poise and precision?"

But it's not just Newsweek. In the Washington Post, former Bush adviser Nicolle Wallace wrote that at the debate, "Bachmann's answers were crisp, strategic and smoothly delivered."

The press have set the bar for Bachmann somewhere near the floor--which means she'll almost always be exceeding expectations. This is one of the defining features of the coverage of her presidential campaign.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote a rather apoplectic column about presidential candidate Michele Bachmann this week, lamenting the fact that other GOP candidates aren't calling her out for being completely ill-prepared for the job:

Bachmann does not deserve to be in the presidential race. Legislatively, she has done little, she knows next to nothing and what she thinks she knows is wrong.

He also called her "an ignoramus" and "a bigot when it comes to gays."

Straight news coverage obviously isn't going to put things like that. But what's remarkable is how reporters seem to give Bachmann credit for being sort of, kind of, well-informed--at least relative to another political figure.

Here's Time magazine's recent take:

It is easy to dismiss Bachmann as a shorter Sarah Palin with a Minnesota accent. But there are important differences. Whereas Palin can stumble over simple questions, Bachmann is far surer on her feet. When Fox News host Chris Wallace recently recounted some of Bachmann's most outrageous statements and asked point-blank whether she is a "flake," the congresswoman didn't blink and delivered a firm recitation of her credentials. During a 2010 interview on MSNBC's Hardball, Bachmann stuck so resolutely to her talking points that the exasperated host, Chris Matthews, asked whether she was "hypnotized." She smiled and repeated them again.

"They'll throw nothing but heat at her, and she stays in the batter's box and doesn't flinch," marvels an adviser to a rival Republican candidate. Her fans say that's because Bachmann, who has two law degrees, offers more substance than Palin and can speak intelligently--and without Palin's mangled syntax--about policy issues. "She's smart. She's well informed," says Ralph Reed. It's true that Bachmann has a scant House record and a penchant for factual misstatements, including her bizarre claim that NATO air strikes killed up to 30,000 Libyans. But few other politicians so effectively combine policy, ideology--and pure star power.

Talk about exasperating.

The ability to recite talking points instead of answering questions can be called a lot of things-- being "sure on your feet" isn't one of them.

Bachmann has a "penchant for factual misstatements"--one example is given, sandwiched between tributes to her intelligence. Compare that to this assessment from early this year, courtesy of a PolitiFact editor:

"We have checked her 13 times, and [found] seven of her claims to be false and six have been found to be ridiculously false," PolitiFact editor Bill Adair told Minnesota Public Radio.

He added that no other politician had been factchecked as often as Bachmann without saying something that was found to be true.

"I don't know anyone else that we have checked more than a couple times that has never earned anything above a false," Adair said. "She is unusual in that regard that she has never gotten a rating higher than false."

That's pretty astounding--and doesn't really come through in the coverage of her campaign.

On top of all of this, of course, is the notion--rampant in the coverage of her campaign--that Bachmann should be compared to Sarah Palin. There's something strange--and deeply sexist--about this. But without a doubt, being compared to the most famously inarticulate national political figure of our era does a tremendous favor to Bachmann.

Richard Cohen is wondering when other Republican presidential candidate will criticize her record; the same question should be asked of the press corps.

The story of Michele Bachmann's surging campaign momentum continues, this time courtesy of Beltway reporter Mark Halperin of Time magazine:

Why has Michele Bachmann suddenly become the It candidate?

With her impressive New Hampshire debate performance, Bachmann has gone from a conservative Sarah Palin-lite curiosity to a potential game changer. For two hours onstage with her GOP rivals, Bachmann appeared polished, serene and in command. Her smooth performance was partly the work of a top-shelf team of veteran advisers (manager Ed Rollins, pollster Ed Goeas, forensic coach Brett O’Donnell). They sanded down some of her rough edges but let Bachmann be Bachmann, complete with zinging anti-Obama applause lines and sunny-side-up conservatism.

Halperin gave some advice on what Bachmann needed to do to keep things going:

Most of all: avoid the kinds of gaffes, misstatements, self-promotional moments and wacky behavior that would cause the media and many traditional Republicans to--once again--write her off.

Huh. Remember that this was a debate where her economic plan boiled down to calling for certain government agencies to be abolished-- especially the Environmental Protection Agency, which she called the "Job Killing Organization of America." That didn't cause the media to write her off--or most voters, either, since they mostly didn't hear about it.

Or when she said:

The Congressional Budget Office has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs. What could the president be thinking by passing a bill like this, knowing full well it will kill 800,000 jobs?

This is, as you might expect, not true. But maybe it qualifies as "sunny-side-up conservatism."

It's not just Halperin, though. Time columnist Joe Klein writes:

Bachmann is often linked with Palin as a Tea Party pinup, but she is a different breed of cat: She knows her stuff. She actually gives factual, informed answers. She lacks Palin's bitter, solipsistic edge. She skillfully framed even her most extreme responses in an amenable way, smothering her opposition to abortion in cases of rape and incest within a paean to the sanctity of life.

If you scan the debate transcript, Bachmann didn't give many factual answers to any of the questions. (This is probably not all that unusual in a debate.)  When she tried to--see above about the 800,000 lost jobs--her "fact" was totally inaccurate. As has been the pattern in the past with her--like when she claimed on CBS there was a study showing 30 percent of doctors were leaving the field due to the healthcare law. There is no such study. CBS viewers didn't know the truth, and it seems like journalists are unwilling to tell people that Michele Bachmann's not telling the truth.

The emerging storyline after the Republican presidential debate this week was that far-right Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann is for real, mostly because she managed to sound, well, a little less crazy than she's sounded before. (No, they didn't quite put it like that.)

There are stories about Bachmann's new Bach-mentum in the New York Times (6/15/11), the Washington Post (6/14/11) and  USA Today (6/15/11).

Let's take the Times' lead:

The key question for Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota before the Republican debate on Monday night was whether she could appeal to voters beyond the Tea Party wing that she helped to create, while avoiding the gaffes that have sometimes emerged from her strident, passionate persona.

By most accounts, she did just that. Ms. Bachmann toned her rhetoric down a bit and offered herself as a competent, knowledgeable insider who would nonetheless carry on the fight against big government with the zeal of a Tea Party activist.

She's hired veteran GOP strategists, the Times' Michael Shear notes:

Those moves suggest that Ms. Bachmann, who is often mocked by late-night comedians and liberal cable hosts as a nutty right-winger, wants to dispel that caricature as she pursues the nomination.

Well OK. Then turn to the Times editorial about the debates, where you read this:

Michele Bachmann had the strangest, most simplistic economic solution of all: simply close down the Environmental Protection Agency, which she said "should really be renamed the Job-Killing Organization of America."

I guess if I was writing a piece about how Bachmann toned down the crazy in this debate, I'd leave out that quote too. It kind of makes it sound like she didn't.

It's normal for the opposition party to deliver a rebuttal address to the State of the Union. Last night Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was given that responsibility. But further-to-the-right Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota delivered the "Tea Party" response to the State of the Union, which was initially scheduled to air on the Tea Party Express website.

That is, until CNN decided it would air it on television. Which meant, as Washington Monthly's Steve Benen put it, CNN broadcast "the president's address, followed by a speech by a far-right Republican, and then followed by another speech by a different far-right Republican."

In response to CNN's justification--that the Tea Party is a "major political force"--he wonders:

Would CNN be inclined to air a SOTU response from the AFL-CIO? Labor unions are a major political force.

I think we know the answer to that one.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, voiced an odd concern about all this in a news article today, wondering whether the GOP message would get lost in the shuffle:

This year, the dueling responses probably made it even harder for either Republican to be heard.

Would viewers remember Ryan, using only his expressive face to convey worry about the debt? Or would they remember Bachmann's screen, which showed bar graphs and patriotic images behind her? At one point, she showed the iconic photo of Marines raising an American flag over Iwo Jima in World War II.

I don't think many people would worry about their own political point of view getting too much uninterrupted TV time.

Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann made two false claims about healthcare on CBS's Face the Nation last Sunday that went unchallenged by host Bob Schieffer. CBS did, however, post an article on their website challenging her claims. FAIR has a new action alert encouraging Face the Nation to debunk Bachmann's lies on its upcoming April 4 broadcast. Read the alert here and post your letters to CBS below.

One of USA Today's regular op-ed features is a "right-left" conversation between conservative columnist Cal Thomas and "liberal" Democratic strategist Bob Beckel in which they seek "Common Ground"--the name of the op-ed feature--on "issues that lawmakers in Washington cannot."

Last week (3/25/10) Thomas and Beckel tackled the issue of "Bias and Fox News"--and really, what could be a better subject of debate for two paid Fox News commentators? Incredibly, they were able to overcome their great differences to defend the network that pays their bills.

Some of the highlights:

Cal: What the Obama administration and Raines and many at the Huffington Post and elsewhere in the Liberal Hemisphere are lamenting is that the media monopoly has ended. Journalists have tended to be liberal, and until the past decade or so, the newspapers and networks held the megaphones. The voices leaving those megaphones all sounded the same. Well, now everyone has a megaphone. And it might be noisier, but as President James Buchanan said, "I like the noise of democracy."

Bob: Hear, hear.

Yes, that's the voice of "the left." And even Beckel's attempts at differentiating himself from Thomas manage to come around to a plug for Fox:

Cal: And say what you will about Beck, but he teaches a lot of history that many Americans have either forgotten or were never exposed to in public schools.

Bob: Beck has brought liberal criticism on himself. Calling President Obama a racist was way out of bounds. I got on Fox the day after that comment and blasted Beck. I never received a single comment from anyone at Fox for doing so. In fact, no one at Fox has ever suggested I ease up on my criticism of conservatives.

While no such "blast" could be found in the Nexis database (Fox doesn't transcribe all of its shows), here's a typical Beckel "criticism" on Fox (Hannity, 10/19/09):

BECKEL: The issue here is the question of the Fox News issue, which is something very near and dear to my heart, since I've been on this network now for six years. And I will say this. What I don't understand is, they can disagree with you--and they should because they're right and you're wrong. And so's Beck and so's O'Reilly.

But the rest of these shows are news shows, and good shows. And why they leave this up to a few of us to come on the air against wing nuts, I mean, if you can't--I have to go up against Michele Bachmann, against Michelle Malkin. I mean, if you can't handle Michele Bachmann, you Democrats out there won't come on, you don't deserve to be in the business.

HANNITY: Have I been fair to you?

BECKEL: Yes, you have.

That Fox's "news" shows are less partisan or ideological than its "opinion" shows is Fox's standard defense (and one that both Beckel and Thomas bring up in their USAT debate), but it's easy enough to debunk; see Extra!: "Fox News—Wing of the GOP?" (12/09) by Steve Rendall.

Beckel's brand of "criticism" is hardly likely to earn him a reprimand from Fox--in fact, it's exactly what gets you a gig on Fox News--as well as at USA Today.

We've noted the corporate media's double standard on Nazi analogies: When conservatives are compared to the Third Reich, however obscurely, it's an outrageous slur, but when leaders of the right charge progressives with Hitler-like tendencies, it's unremarkable political rhetoric.

Political Animal's Steve Benen (12/8/09) rounds up some similar examples of criticisms that are outrageous when applied by the left to the right, but no big deal when they go the other way--starting with the manufactured controversy over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's likening Republican foot-dragging over healthcare reform to conservatives' lack of urgency over women's suffrage and ending slavery:

If we're to believe the faux-outrage, the reference to slavery was the rhetorical element that went too far. But this, apparently, is a new concern--the right has been far more direct in making the same comparison. Harry Reid was talking about key moments in history in which the right was wrong, but Michele Bachmann recently called the Democrats' legislative agenda "nothing more than slavery," and no one said a word. Indeed, conservatives routinely insist that the left is trying "enslave" America, and the political mainstream just shrugs its shoulders in response.

This is not uncommon. In 2005, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) described the Bush administration's torture policies and system of secret prisons as being reminiscent of "Soviets in their gulags." At the time, the media and Republicans were apoplectic about Durbin's remarks, sparking a week-long frenzy. Several conservatives called on the Senate to censure Durbin, and Karl Rove, at the time a high-ranking White House official, argued that Durbin's quote was evidence that liberals are traitors. Durbin eventually offered a tearful apology.

But notice that just a few days ago, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Republican leadership, called Medicaid a "health care gulag." Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) recently called Dems' health care reform efforts "Soviet-style gulag health care." Neither reporters nor other members of Congress batted an eye.

Also note, when Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) said Republicans are promoting lethal healthcare policies, it was a huge national controversy. When Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said the same thing, no one seemed to care.

Journalists really ought to try putting the next GOP press release on this topic in the circular bin. "He called me a name back" is a complaint that you should have learned not to take seriously by the second grade.

The Rasmussen poll has been criticized for putting a right-wing skew on its questions--a strategy that helps Scott Rasmussen garner frequent appearances on Fox News and the like, but severely diminishes its usefulness as a guide to public opinion.

The latest example of Rasmussen's tilt is particularly tendentious: "How important is it to you that the dollar remain the currency of the United States?" the pollster asked (3/29-30/09), finding 70 percent saying it was "very important" and 88 percent saying at least "somewhat important."

Needless to say, there are no plans to replace the dollar as the currency of the United States--what there is, however, is China's suggestion that a new currency be created for international trading purposes, and an attempt by some on the right (notably Rep. Michele Bachmann) to scare people into thinking that the New World Order is coming to take their dollars away.

The striking thing is that Rasmussen appears to know there are no such plans. "I was really curious where the suspicion level was going to be on this particular question," he told Talking Points Memo (4/31/09). "If the idea got around that this meant replacing the currency in your wallet," he added, "then absolutely there would be support building for protecting the dollar." He seems to be saying that he was testing out how people would respond to misleading scare tactics--and, in the process, furthering those scare tactics himself.