TAPPER: Media has failed country

3:16 PM, Aug 21, 2012
By DANIEL HALPER

The Weekly Standard - In an interview with Laura Ingraham, White House reporter Jake Tapper said that the media is failing the country.

"A lot of people are hurting out there. Unemployment is 8.3 percent. That doesn’t even take into account the underemployed,” he said, arguing that too much time has been spent not talking about the economy.

Tapper also criticized the media for not giving enough attention to the war in Afghanistan.

"We are spending a lot of time in the last few weeks, those of us in the political world, political journalists and also politicians, talking about things other than the economy," said Tapper. "[A] lot of people are hurting out there. I’d like to see more action taken and more emphasis given to this issue.”

Tapper also said he relates to Mark Halperin's recent comments about the media. Over the weekend, Halperin said, "I think the press still likes this story a lot, the media is very susceptible to doing what the Obama campaign wants, which is to focus on this."

"I have said before… [that I] thought the media helped tip the scales. I didn’t think the coverage in 2008 was especially fair to either Hilary Clinton or John McCain," Tapper said.

On the 2008 coverage, he noted, "Sometimes I saw with story selection, magazine covers, photos picked, [the] campaign narrative, that it wasn’t always the fairest coverage."

Listen to the entire discussion here.