Opinion: Global VP debate commentary: The next big thing in media coverage?

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Every news medium on Earth is covering these debates, and although they’re not as good as DJ, they’re definitely generating a whole new approach to their coverage. We’re now getting post match reviews, analyses, and any amount of spin, just like Friday Night Football.

The BBC commentary is interesting, even if you get the impression that a standard number of words is in use, and agendas aren’t too hard to spot:

Steve Benen, The Washington Monthly: For anyone who cares about susbtance, it wasn't close. Palin just kept repeating lies and nonsense, regardless of the question, and regardless of common sense. On point after point, Biden just out classed her. The two really didn't belong on the same stage.

Michelle Malkin, michellemalkin.com: Five weeks on the campaign trail, thrust onto the national stage, she rocked tonight's debate. She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message... McCain has not done many things right. But Sarah Palin proved tonight that the VP risk he took was worth it.

OK, it’s an American election, and nobody expects pure objectivity or neutrality.

Substance was an issue, and so was folksiness. I don’t know when the GOP became the home of “folksy”, but I’m not sure it’s working with arguably the most totally frustrated electorate since the Civil War.

Palin appeared to be in “play safe” mode, right for a neophyte public performer, but whether it was the right contrast for Biden’s obvious strengths is, well, debatable. Using one of Ronald Reagan’s lines, “Oh, Joe, there you go again,” previously used on Jimmy Carter, may or may not be an indication of how the Republicans want to play these debates.

The problem is that a lot of the current electorate weren’t even alive when that comment was made, and many of the rest were in primary school. This isn’t the same world, and retro rusticisms might not be the answer to what the US electorate wants to hear.

US commentary was mixed, predictably enough. The New York Times was pretty dry, but hit a few nails in passing:

One to One | 10:25 p.m. Ms. Ifill tries to break through the conventional wisdom about their biggest weaknesses. She notes that Ms. Palin’s is that she lacks experience and Mr. Biden’s is that he lacks discipline. In her answer, Ms. Palin sails off about her executive experience.

Mr. Biden gets closer to answering, saying that some say his weakness is not discipline but his passion, but adds: “I’m not going to change, I have 35 years in public office.”

He then refers to a gender issue that may be rippling through this debate. He delivers a heart-felt answer about being a single parent and challenges the notion that because he isn’t a woman, he doesn’t understand certain basic issues.

Biden was wearing his heart on his sleeve at this point in the debate, and if anything the level of understatement here is a bit wide of the mark. Both candidates hit their personal experiences, and this was a defining point.

One thing obvious is that Palin has managed to work according to the needs of the debate, at least as a public performer. Her real problem is that she’s been seriously oversold in the media, and the levels of expectation have been bumping into the fact she’s only been part of the machine for a few weeks.

By those criteria, if not our DJ poll, she did quite well.

The LA Times was equivocal:

With a relatively steady performance, the Alaska governor may have helped arrest voters' declining confidence in her candidacy since John McCain first put her on the Republican ticket five weeks ago.

Debates typically reinforce voters' existing perceptions, rather than dramatically alter them. And Biden, whose history of making gaffes is Washington legend, stuck largely to safe ground.

The six-term Delaware senator avoided direct attacks on Palin, focusing his criticism instead on McCain, a tried-and-true tactic for the No. 2 member of a ticket.

Biden, as a matter of fact, came across as exactly what he is: An extremely experienced politician with a lot of years.

The contrast between VP candidates is really pretty extreme, and they both used that contrast as selling points. Palin was being a regular Mom, non-Washington, which does appeal to some people. Biden happens to be one of Washington’s true survival stories, and that matters to those who think it takes people who know the system to fix it.

Xinhua, interestingly, did a very good job of extracting representative quotes and explaining issues and differences simultaneously:

Palin said Democratic presidential nominee Obama's economic plans are "the backwards way of trying to grow our economy" because she believes he would raise taxes too high on too many people.

She noted that Biden said recently it would be "patriotic" of the wealthy to pay higher taxes.
"That's not patriotic," she says. In her view, millions of Americans believe government is "the problem" and doesn't need more in taxes.

She added that "millions of small businesses" would pay higher taxes because Obama would raise them on those who earn more than 250,000 U.S. dollars a year while Biden said the fact is that 95 percent of small businesses earn less than that amount.

Also interesting is the fact that Xinhua, a press agency in a communist country, managed to avoid the spin of the Western democratic press.

Even in Australia, we’ve been getting cheerleading for the candidates, and as a way of providing information, it leaves a lot to be desired.

As a rationale for reporting news, it leaves a lot more to be desired. We had a landslide win for Biden on the DJ poll. Other sources are now coming out with “dead heats”. Maybe that just reflects the sources more than the audience, but as a basis for a campaign assessment, I’d say beware of political media claiming omniscience.

Politics has a tendency to become a denial factory at the wrong times. So does the political media. Palin, on the basis of some previous performances, did a lot better than expected, but it wasn’t stellar. Nobody becomes a perfect performer overnight, and really, from the look of her material, she was just expected to stick to basics.

We’ll have to see how this pans out, but this race is starting to crank itself up to another level, and the next four weeks aren’t going to be this laid back.

It's definitely going to create a lot of work for people trying to cover the debates, too.

Don't miss our coverage of the Presidential candidates debate next week on DJ.