Whitewashing the Media of the 1990s

by Matt Stoller [courtesy of Open Left - Front Page]

Chuck Todd:

"It's fascinating: Nobody's been a bigger victim of the so-called YouTube moments than Bill Clinton," Todd said. "I think Bill Clinton was woefully unprepared for 21st Century media."

Although Clinton caught a glimpse of the digital future when he was president and a little-known Internet gadfly named Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, he was never subjected to the kind of unblinking scrutiny of today's media environment.

Ah, remember the 1990s, those glorious days when Clinton could speak unmolested by a restrained media environment.  It's not like ABC News producers were pretty much advising the Starr investigators, that accusations that Clinton was a murderer were regularly thrown around with impunity, or that advisors of Clinton were accused of domestic violence with no evidence by Matt Drudge.

Bill Clinton is hated by the media in DC, he always has been.  By pretending like this is new, like Clinton is just unprepared for technology, Todd exculpates his industry's role in 1990s and 2000s of undermining democracy through dramatic bouts of misinformation culminating of course in the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the remarkable deception around the war.

John McCain gets basically no scrutiny, Obama and Hillary are subjected to immense amounts of it.  None of this justifies Bill, Hillary, or Obama's behavior, such as it is, but it is useful to notice how technological changes somehow allow people like Chuck Todd to maintain the illusion of their own lack of agency in politics.