I hate this I hate this I hate this

I hate feeling obligated to defend Howard Dean - again. But it appears the media, thriving on conflict and drooling on blood-letting, has decided that Dean will be the nominee and is setting up its script for the fall elections, the one where they come up with a single-phrase description of each candidate with which all coverage must agree. And the line for Dean looks like it's becoming "angry, out-of-the-mainstream hypocrite" - although the RNC is pushing "pessimistic," so don't count that out.

Put another way, the reason I can stomach doing this is that defending Dean provides a critique of the media and the sorry, dysfunctional way they cover the political process.

What brings this up now is a December 29 CBS News item about how Dean,

who has criticized the Bush administration for refusing to release the deliberations of its energy policy task force, as governor of Vermont convened a similar panel that met in secret and angered state lawmakers. ...

In 1999, he offered the same argument the administration uses today for keeping deliberations of a policy task force secret.

"The governor needs to receive advice from time to time in closed session. As every person in government knows, sometimes you get more open discussion when it's not public," Dean was quoted as saying.

CBS tries mightily to make the two cases as identical as possible, even at the cost of coverage which can best be described as misleading, claiming "the parallels between the Cheney and Dean task forces are many." Except that Dean's panel was devoted to a single, narrow issue - restructuring Vermont's nearly bankrupt electric utilities - that needed immediate attention; Cheney's was a broad rewrite of energy policy.

Both declined to open their deliberations, even under pressure from legislators.

Except that Dean's group did hold one open meeting; Cheney's held none.

Both received input from the energy industry in private meetings

Except that Dean's group also heard from environmentalists and advocates for the poor; Cheney's specifically excluded them.

and released the names of task force members publicly.

Except that Dean's group did so willingly upon release of the report; the membership of Cheney's group has never been formally revealed - rather, his aides have leaked names to reporters.

They even try to equate campaign contributions.

The Bush-Cheney campaign and Republican Party received millions in donations from energy interests in the election before its task force was created.

Dean's Vermont re-election campaign received only small contributions from energy executives, but a political action committee created as he prepared to run for president collected $19,000, or nearly a fifth of its first $110,000, from donors tied to Vermont's electric utilities.

Except that Cheney's plan can be easily and properly seen as a reward for campaign cash, while the contributions to Dean came after the study was completed and were for an office in which he would not be in a position to easily do those utilities any special favors.

Now, it should go without saying that open deliberations were the proper and right way to go and Dean was and is wrong to advocate seclusion, especially since the result of the panel was hardly a boon to consumers, who wound up footing most all of the bill to get the utilities back on their feet (although investors did take some hits as well). The point here is, not one of these "many" (actually, four) "parallels" holds up under the most casual scrutiny.

So why write it that way? Why not write it as "Dean, Cheney energy panel comparisons overdrawn?" Because that doesn't fit the emerging script and while all reporters, editors, and producers want to help edit that script (it makes them feel important), none of them have the guts to leave the pack in order to do it. Nothing makes them more timid than having no one else follow up on a story they've done, so coverage gets reduced to lowest common denominator, everyone watching everyone else, a media that is no longer mass but mob, and they wind up arguing over semicolons and subordinate clauses of the script instead of its content.

I hate this.