On the Media: Las Vegas papers take sides on Harry Reid-Sharron Angle race
The Las Vegas Review-Journal has gone to great lengths to make clear its loathing for U.S. Sen. Harry Reid. The newspaper's publisher regularly writes about why the Senate majority leader is "so dumb." The editor gives moral support to Reid's election challenger, "tea party" darling Sharron Angle.
Nevada's largest daily newspaper even raised the dead this week in its Reid fatwa. It prominently featured a news story about an octogenarian's obituary because the old woman's relatives made clear in her death notice that she really didn't like Reid.
Buried several pages back in the same day's paper, a reader might have missed the short wire story about Angle. It revealed that Angle told the Christian Broadcasting Network that God directed her into the campaign, that she had had a "preparatory time" just like Jesus and Moses and that she favored conservative news outlets (she has been ducking most media) because that helped her raise money.
Las Vegas has been known for decades for its bare-knuckle, partisan press wars. But even longtime Nevadans have been chagrined by the inchoate fury that the local newspapers, particularly the R-J, have focused on campaign 2010. The fate of one of Washington's most powerful figures hangs in the balance and the state's main newspaper is skulking and slouching through its close-up.
While the conservative R-J crusades to take down its bête noire, its rival, the liberal Las Vegas Sun persistently finds bright spots for Reid, a Senate leader who has long since worn out his welcome with most of the state's voters.
This is the way Fox News and MSNBC do it. This is the way talk radio hosts do it. This is not the way, fortunately, that most newspapers do it today, though their 19th century counterparts would provide plenty of precedent for this sort of, ahem, Whigging out.
"It seems like some of the patterns you are seeing on the national level are playing out here," said David Damore, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "That sort of coverage may be fine for the partisans and the decided, but if I am the undecided voter approaching this race, how do I figure it out? That's a tough one."