Michele Bachmann Response

Rep. Michele Bachmann may fall into that media-savvy cadre of politicians who, as the saying goes, has never met a camera she didn’t like, but Tuesday night many Americans got the impression she was talking into the wrong camera.
Bachmann delivered her secondary response to the State of the Union speech into the camera of the Tea Party Express, which had invited her to speak and streamed the comments live. But to those who were watching on CNN, the only news network that made the decision to air the speech live, she appeared to be looking off-screen to the left.

It was a small technical mishap, but it caught Washington’s attention. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod began his post-speech interview with Lawrence O’Donnell with the jibe, “Am I looking at the right camera?”

The glitch became a defining moment for a State of the Union address that was marked less by what was said than by an unprecedented lack of control over who was delivering the messages and when.
This theme began more than an hour before the president took the podium, when the full text of the speech was leaked to the National Journal by a Democratic source, forcing the White House to release its own unembargoed version of the speech.
It continued during the responses, as CNN – the only news network that had made the decision to air the second, tea party response from Bachmann (R-Minn.) – put a big clock counting down the minutes until her response and then removed it when she got stuck behind the president’s motorcade, thus delaying the speech.
CNN had already made itself the talk of the political world when it announced its decision on Tuesday to air Bachmann’s tea party response, in addition to the official Republican response from Rep. Paul Ryan.
The move drew some criticism from Republicans. “It’s not responsible journalism,” one Republican aide told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, complaining that it made the Republicans look conflicted when they weren’t.
But CNN Political Director Sam Feist defended the decision, and was surprised that others didn’t choose to join in, particularly since they all had the rights to air the pool feed and knew that the speech was one of the most eagerly anticipated aspects of this year’s State of the Union event.
“Every network in the pool had the rights to the signal,” Feist said. “We just happened to be the only network to put it live as she was doing it. I was kind of surprised because it has been such an interesting debate.”
One of the more interesting aspects of the night was Fox News’s decision not to air Bachmann’s speech live, but rather run it delayed on “On the Record with Greta van Susteren.” Bachmann is a frequent guest on all of Fox News’s primetime shows, though she appears on CNN and MSNBC as well. And, in an interesting twist, the pool camera filming that performance happened to belong to Fox News – which had had Bachmann on just the night before promoting her response.
While Fox News was the cable news network most closely aligned with the tea party in the early days (aside from, perhaps, CNBC, who aired Rick Santelli’s original tea party-creating rant), CNN has aggressively moved to both cover and align itself with the tea party over the past year.
It has put its reporters on the Tea Party Express bus, and recently announced plans to co-sponsor a debate with the Tea Party Express during Labor Day weekend of 2011.
Both that decision and Tuesday’s decision to air Bachmann’s response have drawn flak from both the left and the right.
But Feist argues that his network is simply following a good story.
“We made an editorial decision,” he said. “Based on our news judgment, we decided it was worthwhile to take it live. We did five hours of live coverage of the State of the Union address. Certainly this was part of the debate around the State of the Union.”