They couldn’t really come up with any specific examples, but did mention that “He says some outrageous things.” Again, specific examples couldn’t be remembered. I’ve noticed that this is the narrative I keep hearing in the way he is covered in the media. I find it interesting because my impression of the guy is that his positions on various issues line up with popular polling more than anyone else in the field. After a (very) quick look around in tubeland and I found others wondering about the same phenomenon in comment sections of various sites. I also found one allegedly independent (or at least ‘blind’) study confirming the phenomenon.
Mind you these are impressions and I had to do some digging to even find a little confirmation. But why don’t I already know? Why isn’t it clear from news coverage of the candidates on the issues where they line up with the American people? If we don’t start seeing these issues talked about in our media instead of this horserace crap (a favorite of tweety’s) we stand to lose the opportunity to collectively get our heads around important issues that need addressing. Of course, maybe that’s the way the punditocracy would rather have it,… they know what we should be ‘serious” about after all. As Glenn Greenwald put:
…despite all the incessant chatter about “change” and the intensity of election conflicts, our most significant, dubious policies — the ones that actually shape what kind of country we are and how we are perceived around the world — don’t really get debated at all.
I think the media began to frame him as a kook in large part because when he gave voice to these majority opinions he stuck out like a sore thumb because nobody else (running or not) expressed such things. The talking heads tend not to reflect popular opinion and often deride such positions as ‘not serious’ (<a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/28/centrism/
“>Glenn Greenwald has tons of stuff on this) – thus the talking heads saw Kucinich as an outlier and thus framed him as a Kook. I think they jumped all over the UFO thing because it finally gave them something that supported their framework and didn’t clash with polling, relieving the cognitive dissonance between their opinion of what is mainstream vs the polling of what is mainstream.
These are just my musings. What are your thoughts? Perhaps I’ll update this once I get my hands on a Moyers transcript.
Thank you for this post. I’ve had similar conversation with some friends as well and while I have thoughts about the media’s responsibility for this I think you have articulated this better than I can.
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p>I’m still not voting for the guy but I do really regret he and his important ideas haven’t played a larger role in the race.
… a kook, and I’d be perfectly willing to believe that he is, but I’d like someone to show me something about Kucinich himself and not just quoting other people who think he’s a kook.
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p>I’m not sure I’d vote for the guy myself, but I’d like someone to justify the kook statement if for no other reason than I want to know what it is that I’m missing here.
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p>Charlie think s he’s a kook, perhaps he can cite something.
fall prey to media distortions. I think there’s validity to the claim that the media has distorted perceptions about Kucinich. I don’t agree because of the media, but I have a similar perception of him through personal experiences dealing with his supporters. During the Dean campaign, I was verbally attacked by little old ladies for simply showing up at a demonstration wearing a Dean button. It’s hard to control grassroots volunteers, but if your campaign message encourages hostile encounters with supporters of other candidates, your message of peace might seem hypocritical. A lot can be learned about a candidate from how a campaign is structured.
Kucinich has been suffering a death by a million media paper cuts for years. So often I’ve heard people comment during all of the debates he has participated in that he makes so much sense, too bad he’s Dennis Kucinich. Just goes to show you how our perceptions, if we aren’t actually paying attention for ourselves, are shaped by the media’s characterization of people. Anyone who listened to Bush before he was “elected” knows he was a dolt of the first order, but this got translated by the media into Bush is a guy you wanna have a beer with. The list is long and depressing, actually, of awful media plastic surgeries. I’m heading off to my DTC meeting for a little something uplifting.
Democratic Party “100 Club” dinner He addressed all progressive issues concerns — got several standing ovations. He also looked like he was having a blast. It is a shame that WMUR is not inviting him to tonights St Anselms debate. When he gets a chance he is a great debater and has called the other Dems on issues when they get sanctimonious.
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p>I think he is probably not invited because he is too good in debate.
Kucinich wants to create a Department of Peace. Seems like a good — if not kooky — idea. The thing is, we have one. It’s called the US Department of State.
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p>That’s pretty kooky IMO.
… thing I’ve heard to ‘kooky’ so far. Personally I’m not sure if its so much kooky as merely ill advised and mistaken. Incidentally what do you think of Kurt Vonnegut’s idea for a secretary of the future?
Denny himself suggested Ron Paul be his VP.
as her private property.
…Paul is, in many ways that I’ve described here elsewhere, a bigot.
I’d say it’s damn near essential!
and has a very nice speaking voice. I think we need to be very careful with the good looks, “electability” thing. I’m voting for Kucinich. I think all of the candidates are, to a lesser or greater extent, slaves to a certain conservative national standard that manifests itself in odd mini-incidents like the following: a few weeks ago, Huckabee said something about Bush not knowing anything about foreign policy. Condi was “outraged” and demanded an apology. The media gave this story a lot of column space, air time, bandwith, or what have you. of course, I’m thinking, what the heck is going on? 8 out of 10 Americans probably agree that Bush has conducted American foreign policy like either a blundering fool or a sociopath, and the media is taking Condi’s demand for an apology seriously? There’s still this weird, official reverence for Bush and Cheney that appears in unexpected times and places, and which I think is responsible for the media’s dismissal of Kucinich, more so than the UFO siting or whatever. Kucinich is the only person in Congress who seemed to realize what these guys were really up to from day one of the 2003 “escalation” in Iraq, and advocated impeachment of Cheney through House Resolution 333. Apologize to Bush? Are these people kidding? That the media continues to take certain things like this seriously, that the media continues to feed and foster pseudo-patriotic reverence (criticizing the war is unpatriotic, universal healthcare is communist, etc.), is indicative of the same conservative, and, I dare say, aristocratic, bias that is keeping Kucinich out of the debate. There’s a certain clubbishness in the White House press corps that transcends any consideration for the public welfare or alleviation of human suffering.
Kucinich is actually challenging levels of military spending beyond simply the Iraq war. Compare this to other leading Dems. All, particularly Obama and Clinton, stress the importance of a high-tech (and therefore, high-cost) military, and talk about the need to add soldiers.
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p>Add his single-payer advocacy, and Kucinich is clearly a sorely needed voice. He is the real voice of “change”, and it’s a shame he can’t get any traction.
I don’t have a ton of time to write, but two things strike me:
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p>1) Kucinich represents a threat to the corporate media-controlled status quo. There’s no way that anyone aside from PBS will allow him a modicum of credibility; his views are too threatening to the existing power structure. By ostracising Kucinich, the media is seeking to maintain its control over the electoral process.
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p>2) He looks like Alfred E. Newman. If his views came from someone who looks like, say, Fred Thompson, I bet the media would be singing a different tune.
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p>BTW, video of Kucinich and Moyers available here. (Not, IMHO, Kucinich’s most scintillating performance — I’ve seen better.
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p>Also interesting on Moyers last night is Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s take on life after Iowa.
My eyebrows rose when I saw this diary by Markos. He lists the following items that I’m simply summarizing:
That diary has 1346 comments attached so there might be a lot of information to mine there.
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p>Leading up to 2004, there was a lot of talk about Kucinich “except for abortion”. I recall reading lefty pundits saying that if Kucinich was going to run, he’d have to jettison the anti-choice positions.
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p>Sure enough, he did. Does anyone know whether he is reliably pro-choice now? I haven’t been following.
Since I started following him in 2003 he had switched to being reliably pro-choice and gave what I found to be good reasons for his switch and I believed he would stick to that position.
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p>(And I voted for him in 2004 and probably will again this time.)
That’s the kiss-of-death phrase I hear annoyingly often. The ‘but’ usually resolves to something about how they believe that they’re in a tiny minority and practically no-one else also likes Kucinich and they couldn’t possibly vote for him because they’d be throwing their vote away on an unelectable candidate that many people regard as a kook.
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p>So, it’s a stupid vicious circle. We need to break out of it by being smarter, and by using rankings ballots so that we can vote for our secret kook political crushes and still get our lower ranked choices if we don’t get that.
…he was mayor of Cleveland OH when (a) the city went into default and (b) the Cleveland Mafia put a hit out on him.
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p>I suspect that a lot of people would also blame him for the Cuyahoga river going up in flames, but that happened eight years (1969) before he began his mayoralty (1977).
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p>Kucinich’s problem is that he doesn’t talk in sound bites, which is what the MSM demands. He actually makes a lot of sense when he is on a single radio talk show program (Ed Schultz has had him on several times) for three hours.
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p>And no, the river fire was not his fault, but in the words of Randy Newman, “Burn On, Big River!” 😀
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p>However, after he was kicked out, George Voinovich came in and cleaned up the city, which kick-started his political career. 😉
… doesn’t have baggage as a candidate, I just wonder where the media got this ‘kooky’ narrative.
This may be superficial, but including in many of his campaign speeches a moment where he turns in circles with his arms held straight out from his shoulders may just be part of it.
supports single payer insurance, supports gay marriage, actually tried to impeach Cheney, and seems like he might not listen very well to monied interests like the Enron-esque, pro-privatization utility lobby back in Cleveland all those years ago. He also commits the unforgivable sin of talking about “peace and love” as if they were things to be desired.