Over on the homepage, an article about Bob McDonnell’s event on education-spending reform, and how the press covering him didn’t care about some silly issue like improving Virginia’s schools, and instead focused on what really is on the minds of voters in the commonwealth, which is could he repeat everything he had said about his master’s thesis from the previous day’s 90-minute conference call.
It’s not that McDonnell’s thesis isn’t a story. It’s that the Washington Post has now written four articles, two of which ran on the front page, a house editorial, a Ruth Marcus column, and a Toles cartoon dealing with the thesis. Marcus, Toles, and page A1 had little or no interest in the Virginia governor’s race until they could shout, “Look, scary theocrat!”
UPDATE: For contrast, here is the extent of the Post’s coverage of McDonnell’s education plan in today’s paper: “McDonnell tried to steer attention away from the thesis by appearing at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria to unveil a plan to pump more dollars into Virginia classrooms by diverting money away from inefficiencies and ‘bureaucracy.’” One paragraph, 37 words.
I have great respect for Howard Kurtz, but he’s fooling himself if he thinks his paper isn’t going into a frenzy that they would never pull against a Virginia Democrat.