This from Mike Duggan on Romenesko:
Let’s come clean. The real reason George W. Bush won the election isn’t that he spent $346 million or convinced fundamentalist Christians that he was the candidate most likely to bring on the end days. No, Bush won the election because of a clandestine campaign on his behalf by journalists everywhere, who are united in their desire to elect the best candidate based on his qualifications. Well, one qualification anyway: quotablility.
Journalists don’t care about the deficit or foreign policy, or even — as this election proved once again — a candidate’s lies and evasions. Nope, they care about a couple of good quotes they can run up high in their copy, thereby increasing the chances of getting their stories, and not coincidentally their bylines, on the front page.
Anyone who gives the recent presidential election even a moment’s thought will recognize how much more quotable Bush was than his opponent, John Kerry. Bush speaks English like he’s still learning it, and in the short sentences that reporters, most of whom combine atrocious handwriting with zero knowledge of shorthand, can get down in their notebooks without much trouble.
John Kerry? You might as well try to quote someone reading the tax code.
Every journalist knows I’m telling the truth. Here in Alaska, this phenomenon — dubbed “Vote the Quote” by my friend David Postman at the Seattle Times — is the only thing that could explain, for example, the 1990 election of Gov. Wally Hickel, the man who gave us quotes like: “You can’t let nature run wild.”
This has worked so well in Alaska — we still have U.S. Rep. Don Young, who once said someone was “slavitating like Pribilof’s dog” — that we’re thinking of taking a “Vote the Quote” campaign national in four years. If nothing else, I could get a high-paying job as executive director.
So, if you’re a journalist who is tired of trying to keep up the false front of neutrality, come join us.