Finally, a major media source admits it overplayed the “Dean Scream.”
It probably means little now to Howard Dean, but CNN’s top executive believes his network overplayed the infamous clip of Dean’s “scream” after the Iowa caucuses.
“It was a big story, but the challenge in a 24-hour news network is that you try to keep all of your different viewers throughout the day informed without overdoing it,” said Princell Hair, CNN’s general manager.
The breathtaking media explosion turned the former Democratic presidential front-runner into a punch line and arguably hastened his campaign’s free fall. It’s also an instructive look at how television news and entertainment works today.
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the cable and broadcast news networks aired Dean’s Iowa exclamation 633 times — and that doesn’t include local news or talk shows — in the four days after it was made, according to the Hotline, a Washington-based newsletter.
Talk about a day late and a dollar short, after the man’s campaign was sent into a freefall because people got themselves convinced that an exhuberant speech (to a cheering, supportive crowd) was a sign of some kind of unpresidential “imbalance.” (Right, heaven forbid we should have a president who can actually name several states and pronounce the word “nuclear.”
Joe Trippi, who lost his job as Dean’s campaign manager in the aftermath of the speech and its media flogging, hit the nail on the head.
Trippi regards the argument that the speech received so much coverage because it symbolized the campaign’s troubles as a rationalization.
“It was like the footage of a heat-seeking missile hitting its target,” he said. “Once the press gets that, it just gets played over and over again for a week, and people say, `How cool.’ That’s what I think happened here. It was entertainment masquerading as news.”
The more I hear, the more I believe that the majority American voters are pretty much idiots, and they get the government they deserve. The problem is the rest of us have to live with it.