Opinion: The lure of free media
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Chris Dodd is a highly respected U.S. senator but, in the Democratic presidential race, a lower-tier candidate struggling to establish any sort of buzz and visibility.
About a month ago, he hoped that having singer Paul Simon join him on the trail in Iowa would do the trick (it didn’t, but one result was a delightful story by the Hartford Courant’s David Lightman). Tonight, viewers of Fox News can check out Dodd’s latest gambit: an on-air debate with Bill O’Reilly on the weighty issue of whether the Daily Kos political blog is or is not beneath contempt.
O’Reilly, as virtually anyone who has dipped a toe into the blogosphere knows, attacked Daily Kos a few weeks back as ‘a vicious, far-left website’ that spews ‘hatred.’ (If you need a refresher course on his comments, here it is.) The immediate target of his remarks was JetBlue, which he excoriated for agreeing to lend its name as a sponsor of YearlyKos, the convention of left-leaning bloggers that takes place in Chicago this weekend. O’Reilly accomplished his short-term goal when JetBlue unlinked itself from the gathering. But as illustrated by Dodd’s willingness to appear on ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ the conservative commentator hit upon a topic to help get him through the dog days of summer.
Dodd’s campaign, for its part, was patting the candidate on the back even before his television face-off with O’Reilly. It noted in a Tuesday release that a leading progressive blogger had written that the Connecticut lawmaker would be the first White House contender ‘to personally appear on a leading right-wing show for the explicit purpose of defending the liberal blogosphere.’
But, of course, in the Democratic campaign, hardly anyone ever beats Hillary Clinton to the punch. The Dodd release did not note that last week, one of Clinton’s leading aides, Howard Wolfson, showed up on O’Reilly’s show to rally to the defense of Daily Kos. (To see that, go here.)
-- Don Frederick