Joe the Plumber gets his 15 minutes

Coverage on voting issues barely makes the cut with Joe the Plumber dominating the news
Courtesy of Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism

Wurzelbacher must be the most talked about plumber in the news. The media has descended on him with a fury of ‘investigative journalism’, checking everything from his tax records to his voting records. As it turns out he is not a licensed plumber and his first name is not really Joe.According to Jonah Goldberg of the New York Post, the news media has declared war on McCain's Everyman. Joe, he claims, is just being punished by the media for exhorting "revealing but embarrassing answers out of the media's preferred candidate". He represents individualism in opposition to Obama’s ‘collectivist’ policies to "spread the wealth around."
These media critics’ question seems to be: why is the media attacking Joe? The question should be why is the media even covering Joe so feverishly? Between October 13 and19 Joe the Plumber became the No. 3 campaign storyline of the week (filling 8% of the election news hole) according to the Campaign Coverage Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Joe is even being asked for his insights on Social Security and off-shore drilling, by Couric and Huckabee.
When it comes to election coverage, the media narrative is dotted with pseudo celebrities to create controversy - Reverend Jeremiah Wright, former radical William Ayers, and Alaska Trooper Mike Wooten, just to name a few. No doubt McCain shamelessly used Joe to symbolize the middle class man with the American dream. With the 25 mentions of his name in the presidential debate, some talk about Joe the Plumber was inevitable. But the media has catalyzed the process and catapulted him to his newfound Britney-Spears status. According to the celebrated plumber himself, he said he was surprised to hear his name so predominantly featured in the debate. "That bothered me. I wished that they had talked more about issues that are important to Americans." Well, I wish the media would talk more about issues that are important to Americans instead of creating and destroying 15-minute celebrities.

Palin vs. Palin

The two faces of Sarah Palin in the media
Photo courtesy of CTV

Thursday’s vice presidential debate seemed to be Palin vs. Palin. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times and Tom Shales of the Washington Post were in agreement that Palin’s opponent was more her image in the media than Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Who. It was Palin of the Katie Couric - Tina Fey fame vs. confident and feisty soccer mom. According to Jane Kim of the Columbia Journalism Review, “the debate was about media representation, billed as self-representation.” With Palin it’s more about the image and less about the issues. In fact she made it exceedingly clear that she would not be answering the moderator’s questions until she had completed her talking points. And who came blame her. Her image in the media is so tarnished (for good reason, some may say) her biggest battle was in fact against the “other” Sarah Palin. On the other hand, she had managed to lower media expectations to a point where David Brooks of the New York Times may be justified in claiming “few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night.” Few could have indeed. Evan Cornog of the Columbia Journalism review, says it in all his eloquence : "Palin’s abysmal performance in recent press interviews, particularly her talks with Katie Couric of CBS, had lowered expectations so far that anything short of rotating her head 360 degrees and vomiting green slime while masturbating with a crucifix would have counted as a victory." (Reference to the Exorcist)