The Message and the Messenger

Yesterday’s response by Carly Fiorina to the question of Sarah Palin’s qualifications to run a Fortune 500 company, specifically Hewlett-Packard, went from bad to worse when she added John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the list of unqualified hypothetical CEOs.

The radio interview spawned a series of TV interviews later in the day; of particular note is the Andrea Mitchell interview that aired yesterday afternoon. Mitchell, NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, has been regularly involved in campaign coverage on both NBC and MSNBC. As afternoon anchor on MSNBC, she was in the role of reporting the news, a distinction worth noting since MSNBC’s evening programming shifts from news to opinion.

The Fiorina story was picked up in the evening on MSNBC’s latest entry, The Rachel Maddow Show, in which, interestingly, Fiorina’s references to Obama and Biden also being unqualified were edited from the clip. Maddow also hosts a program on Air America, and is unequivocally recognized as a liberal voice.

Earlier this month, in the wake of ongoing criticism and uneasiness within its own news division about the objectivity of its campaign coverage, NBC pulled back its two lead MSNBC hosts from election coverage. Clearly, the line distinguishing “news” from “opinion” can be very thin. However subtle, when the media chooses to deliver only a part of the story, they do little to counter the claim of bias.