NYT Reporter: Why Does Netflix Documentary Show 'Human, Warm Side' of Romney That His Campaign Could Not?
During a report on Wednesday's NBC Today about an upcoming Netflix documentary of Mitt Romney's two presidential runs, New York Times reporter Ashley Parker scratched her head over the footage taken by fimmaker Greg Whiteley: "One
of the big questions is, why could this 90-minute documentary by a
filmmaker convey a personal, human, warm side of Mitt Romney that his
team of very high-paid strategists could not?" [Listen to the audio]
Perhaps the reason lies in the way Parker and her media colleagues
constantly portrayed Romney as being out-of-touch with voters. In one article after another
during the 2012 campaign, Parker described Romney as being stuck in a
"defensive" posture on every political issue he discussed.
In the Today report, White House correspondent Peter Alexander
declared: "It's a rare and intimate look at the man who could have been
president. The new documentary Mitt capturing a candidate most people
never saw." How many "never saw" that side of Romney because of slanted
press coverage?
As the Media Research Center documented in 2012,
the media routinely hyped every Romney misstep as a major gaffe while
using partisan fact-checking to undermine his campaign message. At the
same time, topics damaging to President Obama -- like the bad economy or
the Benghazi terrorist attack -- were routinely minimized.
In
an interview with Whiteley following Alexander's Wednesday report,
co-host Savannah Guthrie wondered why the documentary didn't focus more
on Romney's gaffes: "We see sort of a personal -- a much more personal
side of Mitt Romney. The film doesn't get into things like the 47%
remark and some of these issues that were political issues in the
campaign. Was that by design or was that a function of the kind of
access that you got?"
Whiteley explained: "Well, I felt like my strategy in making the film
was just show up and shut up and just film. I asked him about 47%, he
just didn't give me an answer that he hadn't already given 100 other
times to reporters. And that wasn't really the strength of my
footage....I didn't want to just rehash stuff that people already had
rehashed. The strength of my footage was just these very candid personal
family moments..."
At the end of the segment, Guthrie teased a live interview with Romney on Friday's Today.
— Kyle Drennen is Senior News Analyst at the Media Research Center. Follow Kyle Drennen on Twitter.
