…for campaign news this year, according to Katty Kay of BBC.

Kay was a panelist on yesterday morning’s discussion of the press and the 2008 campaign, called “Covering the Campaign of a Lifetime,” which was held in NYU’s Foundations of Journalism class. Along with Kay sat Howard Goldberg of the Associated Press, Abderrahim Foukara of Al-Jazeera, Patrick Healy of the New York Times and Jay Rosen, an NYU faculty member and founder of the media-criticism blog PressThink. Topics of discussion ranged from McCain’s treatment of foreign media (“at one point, he did say [the BBC] were communists,” said Kay) to whether the candidates are going to follow in the press relations traditions of President Bush (who has mounted a “very aggressive reality-replacement program,” according to Rosen).

Kay was the first to introduce the “crack-addict” metaphor, explaining that the boredom she saw among election reporters was because they are “so used to having the most incredible headlines, that when there isn’t one, they say, hey this story’s getting boring.”

Healy, who covered Hillary Clinton’s campaign, said that his addiction “nearly did [him] in with Hillary. She was the ultimate supplier.” 

Kay and Healy emphasized the drama and significance of the 2008 election season, which has stirred up issues like race, gender, and religion that would not otherwise have been broached.

But the panel agreed that the press might be overlooking the issues and over-emphasizing the competitive nature of the race instead.

“The American press came into [this election season] with the narrative equipment and ideas that really were built for another world,” said Rosen. “They’re totally out-loaded and ill-equipped to deal with [this race].”

Rosen also stressed the way the candidates have been manipulating the press and charged McCain’s campaign with “conducting a culture war against the media in the tradition of President Bush.

“McCain decided to go with the full Rove, the full Bush, dump reality, say anything, attack the press so that it de-legitimizes them,” Rosen said.

Meanwhile, Foukara brought in the voice of his Middle Eastern audience and Arab-Americans, and reminded the panel that for his audience, the most important issue was Iraq, which “hits [so] deep within the Arab psyche…that the closest parallel is the 9/11 attacks.”

But the most controversial part of the discussion may have been when Healy decided to actually defend McCain.

“Lets be really charitable to John McCain,” Healy began, and pointed out that he probably wasn’t responsible for all the tactics of his campaign and that he has refrained from playing the race card.

“There are still some sense of limits in American discourse,” said Rosen.

Photo by Michael Stasiak