I appreciate your comments--and also your e-mails. They raise a couple points I'd like to respond to.
1. I don't take issue with the idea that Rep. Allen ran a poor campaign. And I think there's a strong case to be made that even with much better reporting and editorial coverage from BDN and PPH, he still might have lost.
As I wrote in the post:
That's not too say that the skewed coverage from PPH--or BDN or the AP--proved decisive in the Allen-Collins race. And it's doesn't in any way excuse or explain away the Allen campaign's mistakes.Much could be written about where the Allen folks went wrong. But I'm really not that interested in Allen, and never have been.
Contrary to what's been said and implied by some of our right-leaning readers, he's never been what this blog was about.
So my point really isn't that the press sank Allen or that the press is to blame for his loss. I wasn't trying to summarize the race, or explain why Collins won and Allen lost.
My point, instead, is that the press did an abysmal job. And in way that seemed designed to benefit Sen. Collins. Period.
2. I also didn't mean to imply that Collins should have lost the race over the Edwards interview. (I think it was an embarrassing--and revealing--slip. But in the scheme of things, I don't think it was terribly significant.)
I highlighted the coverage of the Edwards flap because I thought it spoke to the nature of the coverage overall, and because it provided two simple, concrete examples of journalism gone awry.
6 comments:
Why don't you come clean about why you started this blog, from your apartment in new York, with no ties to Maine in any way?
Allen made mistakes during the race...the most critical one was using non-Mainers as the decision makers. If it is true that blogs critical of Collins were administerd from out of state as well that is prima facia evidence as to the lack of understanding the jauggernaut the DSCC faced in the Collins campaign. Big differences between how each was run, press coverage notwithstanding.
I've been clear about why I started the blog from the very beginning.
As I've written previously about the comments section here, I welcome vigorous disagreement about substance. But people interested in argument via insinuation, insult and baseless allegation should take their business elsewhere.
That goes for Collins Watch critics and sympathizers.
It seems that CW has skewed into MediaWatch as opposed to the stated mission of "Keeping an eye on Maine's junior Senator". Is the argument Collins manipulated the press? What did her camp do to control the so-called poor reporting? Putting aside the physical location of the administrator, lets get into a fact-based discussion as to whether Collins - or more likely her campaign team - used sinister methods to control the media. Who were these people?
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