As expected, the national media was largely euphoric over Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s choice of North Carolina Sen. John Edwards as his running mate.
But the hype was not without some introspection by those same media types over their own behavior.

“By early Tuesday morning (July 6),” said Howard Kurtz, host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” “the veepstakes was over and the race was on to define John Edwards. And journalists made it crystal clear they like the guy.”

Kurtz, a respected reporter of the political media for the Washington Post, said on his weekly program, “the front pages were filled with pretty pictures and nice headlines about Kerry, Edwards, the wives, the kids.”

Mark Halperin, who writes and edits the daily political news column “The Note” for ABC News.com, admitted, “We the media love John Edwards.”

On the July 11 edition of “Reliable Sources,” Halperin explained himself – sort of.

“The guy has got a great set of clips, and the (Kerry) campaign did nothing in the first few days of launching John Edwards to get in the way of the press’s natural affinity towards him,” he said.

But Roger Simon of U.S. News & World Report offered more substantial reasons for the media’s enthusiasm for the new vice presidential candidate.

“John Edwards has worked very hard to make the press love him for more than a year,” he said. “I mean, he has taken reporters to lunch. There have been dinners at his house. His wife, who is a very smart and capable campaigner in her own right, has also worked the press very hard.

“This is no accident. This is a guy who has reached out to the media and now has wrapped his arms around them, just like he says he wants to wrap his arms around the voters.”

Edwards’s romancing of the media has worked. The Media Research Center, an Alexandria, Va.-based journalism watchdog organization, contrasted the press’s coverage of the Edwards announcement with President Bush’s revelation four years ago that Dick Cheney would be his running mate.

“In the first 24 hours after Bush announced his choice,” The MRC reported in its July 6, 2004 CyberAlert, “CBS alone tagged Cheney as ‘a bedrock conservative,’ ‘a rock-solid conservative’ with a ‘solidly conservative voting record’ and a man whose ‘politics are of the hard-right variety.’”

The MRC also offered several examples from other networks that emphasized Cheney’s political orientation.

“But in the hours following John Kerry’s announcement that he selected John Edwards as his running mate,” MRC reported, “despite the fact that National Journal rated Edwards the fourth-most liberal senator for 2003, a focus on his ideology was absent from network coverage this morning.”

According to the MRC, CBS’s Harry Smith characterized Kerry’s announcement speech as “right down the middle,” while the watchdog group said the network ignored “the liberalness of either Kerry or Edwards.”

The following day, July 7, MRC noted that major television news organizations continued to disregard Edwards’s liberal voting record, unless the label was applied by Republican sources. Meanwhile, reporters from CNN and Fox News Channel dubbed Edwards “a moderate.”

On July 8, MRC revealed that reporters from six of the nation’s largest circulation newspapers avoided the “liberal” tag for Edwards, instead characterizing him as a “Southern populist.”

The obvious media partiality was summarized by Newsweek’s Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas on “Inside Washington,” a local panel discussion program produced by the CBS affiliate in the nation’s capital.

“Let’s talk a little media bias here,” Thomas said on the July 10 program. “The media, I think, wants Kerry to win.

“And I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards—‘I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox, but—they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there’s going to be this glow about them that some, is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.”

Meanwhile, the July 19 issue of Newsweek featured a cover story titled “The Sunshine Boys?” Thomas contributed to the magazine’s coverage of Edwards and Kerry:

“In the 2004 election, Dick Cheney projects the bleakness of a Wyoming winter, while John Edwards always appears to be strolling in the Carolina sunshine….”

Paul Chesser is associate editor of Carolina Journal. Contact him at [email protected].