Media's Political Coverage Like Kindergartners Playing Telephone

Clipping

The political press, this past week, engaged in an epic game of Telephone: hear the whisper, spread the word. It started last Monday, when Hillary Clinton was interviewed on Fox News and, trying to highlight her experience working within that labyrinth known as Washington, noted that it took a president -- LBJ -- to codify the work of MLK. Then, on Sunday, BET founder Bob Johnson introduced Clinton at a South Carolina campaign event, during which he compared Barack Obama to Sidney Poitier's Dr. John Prentice in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner ("I want to be a reasonable, likeable Sidney Poitier") and alluded -- glibly and unmistakably, though the Clinton camp tried to spin it otherwise -- to Obama's teenage experimentation with cocaine.