It is almost unsporting to consider Hillary Clinton's campaign arguments on their merits at this point.  Any concern about how her plaint du jour might play out for her own campaign -- let alone for her party – now has no place in her calculus.  There is no long term; only a desperate efforts to survive another week. 

But her effort to score a few points (at least with especially unobservant voters) by criticizing Obama as thin-skinned for striking back against the insipid and Limbaugh-ite tone of ABC's recent debate stands out, even for Hillary, for the degree to which it clashes with the interests of the Democratic Party and progressive policy objectives.  

 If anyone should be, and if actually is, aware of the perils of a national political media driven in equal measure by a desire for cheap entertainment  and right-wing propaganda, it is Hillary Clinton.  But set aside for a moment the irony of such a criticism coming from Hillary, who has herself frequently complained in  this very  campaign (often with very good reason) about the media's treatment of herself and  her family , and who maintains a deep distrust of the media’s role in the many, generally manufactured, scandals of the 1990s.  Set aside the fact that most fair-minded observers – including hardcore Hillary-ites like Ed Rendell – noted ABC’s abysmal performance.   Think for a moment about the idiocy of the Clinton campaign’s suggestion that a Democratic candidate should not strike back when a supposedly respectable  press outlet ventriloquizes Sean Hannity and behaves like the unholy spawn of Roger Ailes and Matt Drudge.  (Clinton herself, of course, prides herself on being tough and hitting back:   a “Press can Do No Wrong” rule she advocates for Obama violates the Clinton’s own rapid response principle – though we now see that the ultimate Clinton rule of politics is that rules do not  constrain the Clintons).

The notion that a Democratic candidate should just accept the media as it is, on pain of being dubbed unpresidential and a “whiner,” is sheer political poison for Democrats.   Most readers of this site will demand no proof that the media in this country is a very major part of what is wrong with our politics.   The trivialization of politics; the unexpurgated funneling of right-wing slurs; the inability or unwillingness to address complex economic or scientific issues; and the lack of meaningful wall between the interests of the corporate owners and the journalists they employ.   And the media bear a very great responsibility for some of the worst disasters of recent decades, including the election (sort of) and reelection of a consummately, almost freakishly unfit person to the Presidency; the propagation of global warming skepticism in the name of balance; and the selling of a disastrous and probably illegal war waged for phantom causes. 

As long as the media are constituted as they now are, progressive causes and ordinary citizens will systematically lose.  Criticizing the media; punishing the worst outlets by refusing bookings, and calling for new and better modes of communication are every bit as important to progressive causes as winning particular elections.   Obama was, of course, right to trash ABC for pushing trivial, manufactured issues at the expense of real ones.   If he is going to bring about real change in our politics, he will need to go further.  

Trashing the shallowness of the media can also be good politics.   There is a huge, only occasionally tapped reservoir of contempt for the media out there in the public – not just among “netroots” types with their reflexive jibes at the “MSM,” but among the great liberal and middle of the road masses of Americans.    Many people sense how lazy our news coverage has become, and respond with relief at the more sincere (and infinitely more entertaining) and often even more informative, humor news of Stewart and Colbert.   (Conservatives, of course, are well ahead in disciplining the news media – witness their success in creating an nearly unanimous drumbeat for the Iraq war, and, more recently, the boisterous response to the New York Times’ story on John McCain’s extremely sketchy relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman).

In suggesting that Obama was wrong – or wimpy – for criticizing (albeit quite mildly) the content-free nature of the ABC debate, Clinton was once again, playing right along with the worst right-wing script.  (Previously, of course, Fox News has questioned Obama’s fitness to face down foreign tyrants if he refuses to go on Fox News).   But she has it exactly wrong:   refusing to play by the absurd rules of our traditional media, and insistence on a new way of communicating about politics, will necessarily be a central part of Obama’s reformist movement, if it is to be successful.

Attacking the media, obviously, is not a good in itself.   It is often a tool of tyrants and totalitarians.  But our national media has become dysfunctional enough that pretending that it is neutral, thorough, and fair – in the name of avoiding accusation of shrillness or demagoguery – will no longer do.   Thoughtful criticism of the press from the mini-bully pulpit of the candidate rostrum is every bit as important as is thoughtful criticism of our other leading institutions.   And Obama seems well suited to advance arguments about the often pathetic way in which our politics and policy are covered in this country in a manner that does not seem like special pleading.