TPM's Horse's Mouth ASS Award Goes to AP and writer Nedra Pickler

The Horse's Mouth
A Blog About the Reporting of Politics--and the Politics of Reporting
by Greg Sargent

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/horsesmouth/2007/03/associated_pres_2.php

Associated Press Suggests Obama Lacks "Substance," Doesn't Mention The Books He Wrote
March 27, 2007

Glenn Greenwald takes The Washington Post's Richard Cohen to task today for blasting Obama over the most trivial of memory lapses possible -- the fact that he got the name of a magazine wrong that he'd read when he was nine years old. No, Obama didn't remember the name of a magazine he read roughly in 1970, the year the Beatles broke up and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died.

That was pretty dismal of Cohen, no question. Nonetheless, today's Award for Superficial Sliming -- or ASS -- goes hands down to...the Associated Press' Nedra Pickler!

The news org and Pickler win it for this piece on Obama:

Is Obama all style and little substance?

The voices are growing louder asking the question: Is Barack Obama all style and little substance?

The freshman Illinois senator began his campaign facing the perception that he lacks the experience to be president, especially compared to rivals with decades of work on foreign and domestic policy. So far, he's done little to challenge it. He's delivered no policy speeches and provided few details about how he would lead the country.

There's much more like that. But wait -- no policy speeches since the campaign started? What about this speech on March 21? What about this one on March 2? Those are both foreign policy speeches -- or doesn't that count?

Would it behoove Obama to go into more detail about his plans and policy prescriptions, and would it behoove him to do better on health care than he did over the weekend? Sure it would -- and his lack of experience is undoubtedly a valid topic. But taking things to the point where you're suggesting that the guy may have "little substance" on the strength of this stuff alone seems pretty damn thin. It's deeply superficial and stinks of the worst sort of slavishness to predetermined narratives -- today's being that Obama is a closet lightweight. Your Hack Pack at work, ladies and gentlemen.

One other point: The piece didn't mention that Obama has written several books. If you're going to question whether a guy has substance, that seems like it might have deserved a mention.

Update: It gets better. Now the Republican National Committee is aggressively pushing this AP piece to reporters. Wonder why?

http://mediamatters.org/items/200702270011

Cohen faulted "colleagues" for portraying Gore "as a serial exaggerator" and "pretender" in 2000, ignored his own role

In his February 27 column, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen faulted "some of my colleagues" who "caricatured" former Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign "as a serial exaggerator, a fibber, a pretender -- the guy who invented the Internet, who was the model for the novel (and movie) 'Love Story,' who applied one too many coats of passion to that kiss he delivered to his wife, Tipper, at the Democratic National Convention in 2000." Cohen himself, however, contributed to this "caricature" of Gore in 2000, even after he acknowledged that the portrayal of Gore as dishonest was baseless.

Cohen wrote in his February 27 column:

It's a joke, isn't it? I mean, it was Gore who was universally seen as the flawed man, uncomfortable in his own skin and, therefore, in this TV age, incapable of uniting the nation. He was caricatured by some of my colleagues as a serial exaggerator, a fibber, a pretender -- the guy who invented the Internet, who was the model for the novel (and movie) "Love Story," who applied one too many coats of passion to that kiss he delivered to his wife, Tipper, at the Democratic National Convention in 2000. There were so many reasons not to vote for him -- none, in retrospect, much good.

At the time, however, Cohen himself frequently propagated the image of Gore as an "exaggerator." For example, in his October 12, 2000, Post column, Cohen wrote:

In Reagan's case, these stories were dismissed by his supporters and characterized as charming eccentricities. Yet, some of the same people and editorial organs now get the vapors when confronting one of Al Gore's exaggerations. Gore, for some reason, is a liar while Reagan was just a marvelous storyteller.

I am not going to sit here and defend Gore's exaggerations. I wish he wouldn't make them. I wish he did not say he had been to the Texas fires when he hadn't. (Maybe he ought to have said concentration camp.) I wish he had not compared his dog's prescription plan to his mother-in-law's. I wish he had been a bit more modest about his role in developing the Internet or, way back, in describing his Vietnam War experience.