Friday, August 10, 2012

Mainstream Media Coverage of the Presidential Campaign is Terrible

For example, an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle reads, "Romney Gets Welfare Politics Right as Attack Ad Misses on Facts." Yeah, I'm not sure what that means, either. If you read the editorial you'll see it means that Romney's recent welfare attack ad is misleading some voters with lies -- so why isn't that the headline? Why do you have to read the long-winded editorial halfway through to see what it's getting at?

More to the point, does the Chronicle think that viewers who are apt to be mislead by ads like this one really read editorials down further than the headlines? Do they care about informing the public? Or do they see their role as shaking their heads sagely in the wings as Rome burns, to mix metaphors? There really are a very great many thoroughly useless people in positions of high prestige and power. It'd be nice if we lived in a meritocracy. We're not very close to that yet, if you ask me.

Is the mainstream media really going to remain "objective" in the "controversy" between Harry Reid and Mitt Romney over Romney's hidden tax returns, or, worse, take Romney's side, calling Reid's behavior inexcusable ten times for every time they point out how many more returns than Romney every Republican and Democratic nominee for President has released, going back decades? Just about every single day Romney either flat-out lies -- that we know about. How many more lies would we know about if Romney weren't so hyper-secretive? -- or contradicts something he said earlier. Sometimes earlier the same day. So why does the mainstream media insist on presenting stories suggesting that Romney and Obama and their campaigns are about equally dirty?

Presumably, reporters who spend ALL DAY EVERY DAY studying a subject FOR A LIVING know more about that subject than the average Schmoe. But what good is that knowledge if they deliberately hide it in the name of some purely imaginary "objectivity," which over and over again in political journalism boils down to refusing to take sides between a Fire Department and a fire? Are these professionals really going to wait until the last slack-jawed yokel in the United States has figured out that Mitt is full of shit before they dare to go so far out on a limb as to make pronouncements such as, "It seems that many Americans have begun to wonder whether they can trust everything Mitt Romney says. There is a growing perception that some of his statements may be inconsistent. Insiders have pointed out that many Presidents and Presidential candidates -- even including Mitt's own father, Goerge Romney" *gasps and screams of amazement can be heard in the background, but the on-camera pundit remains stony-face* "have been more forthcoming about their personal finances than Mitt Romney..." and are they going to pat themselves on the back for being so far behind the curve, or, as they call it, "objective," as if perception wouldn't have grown much more quickly in accurate directions if more pundits had been doing their fucking jobs and REPORTING WHAT THEY KNOW?!

Yes, I think they're going to continue to do the same pathetic job of covering this campaign on CNN and the broadcast networks, and no, I don't think they're really even going to try to protect you from lies and corruption. WAKE UP, turn off "The Newsroom," which is designed, as "The West Wing" was, to keep you in a happy trance in a wonderful what-if parallel universe while the real world goes to Hell, GET OFF THE COUCH and work for Obama.

1 comment:

  1. Definitely true. The punditry has gone overboard to hang on to some notion of unbiased objectivity, so even outright Republican lies are reported as "they say" attribution. The Nial Ferguson article in Newsweek was the most egregious example of misinformation and bogus claims, and in a supposedly reputable magazine.

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