OK, so Howard Dean lost it when he lost in Iowa. But in the court of the media, the verdict was unanimous: he’s over. Bloggers and late night comics got in on the fun. But “Perhaps the propensity toward hysteria and overheated rhetoric belongs to the media, not to Dean,” says Yale history professor David Greenberg, in the LA Times.
What had been a relatively innocuous, if slightly goofy, speech, Greenberg says, has metamorphosed into a real threat to his prospects, as late-night comedians drill home the image of a deranged Dean.
Jay Rosen, chair of the Journalism Department at New York University and the author of What Are Journalists For? writing in Tom Paine public interest journal explains that political journalists help to construct political stories “The secret is this: pssst… the press is a player in the campaign.” They are not just observers.
In See How They Run (1990) Paul Taylor wrote: “The premise of this book is that the political dialogue is failing because the leading actors in the pageant of democracy
