Those of us paying attention this morning woke up to somewhat surprising political news: Ted Cruz was still talking, seventeen hours and counting after taking the Senate floor. One would have to be paying attention, as news of Cruz’s stand (it’s not technically a filibuster) hasn’t made the top of the news anywhere nationwide. A Texan senator has taken over the floor of the nation’s most powerful legislative body and that sound you hear is crickets from some corners of the media, derision from others. Compare this coverage to that of another Texan senator, this one a female state senator protesting late-term abortion restrictions, for yet another example of why the public’s trust in the media has plummeted.
The filibuster undertaken by Wendy Davis and the floor speech of Ted Cruz are remarkably similar in their futility. Not a single legislature or informed observer actually expected either of the stunts to achieve anything tangible. They were planned for one reason: publicity. For Wendy Davis, it worked, catapulting her onto the national stage, setting the groundwork for the unknown state senator’s run for the governor’s mansion. The actual contents of Davis’s speech weren’t reported with nearly as much enthusiasm as her shoe choice, however. Given the grotesque nature of what Davis was fighting to protect (abortion via dismemberment of viable human beings capable of feeling pain), it’s understandable that the media chose to focus on fashion first and foremost. The inherent sexism of this choice was lost on a media cheering the rise of a woman in a male-dominated profession.
It remains to be seen how much Cruz will profit from his stunt. Already a darling of his base, the Tea Party, Cruz is unlikely to gain much in the way of more notoriety, given the lack of media coverage.
This morning, at around 7, Cruz discussed how the media should be covering his speech. He chided the impulse to discuss it in terms of Cruz’s possible presidential political ambitions and instead asked that the substance of his speech be the focus. A reporter for Politico, Ginger Gibson, tweeted that that was why reporters “mock” Cruz, a sitting U.S. senator. Gibson, rather unprofessionally, shed light on the usually unspoken impulses of her and her colleagues, who apparently demand reverence from the politicians they cover. Gibson was more than happy to contribute an evenhanded and favorable piece on Wendy Davis for Politico (one of several dozen the site ran on the state senator), which would indicate that she has no similar qualms about Davis’s level of respect for reporters’ integrity or professionalism. Davis, however, has no reason to heap scorn on how reporters do their jobs; she can rely on fair and usually favorable coverage from a media that holds her positions in higher esteem than those of conservatives.
What we’ve learned here is a lesson everyone in the mainstream media and Washington already knows: When politicians play the game and fight for liberal causes, they are rewarded by their equally liberal friends in the press. What makes Cruz and his fellow conservatives the target of reporters’ scorn is their politics, not their lack of reverence for a profession that saw fit to obsess about the shoe choice of a woman who was fighting for access to a procedure so abhorrent that all but four countries in the world have made it illegal.
