Hillary Clinton said the media pushed her out of the race. Barack Obama said the media is picking on his wife. John McCain said the media has treated him like yesterday's losing lottery ticket.
This may be as close as we get to fair and balanced reporting.
Still, it is causing great fulmination about the media stepping over some kind of historical line from reporting the news to making it -- or at least twisting it.
We can relax. That is not happening. There is no line.
There was no line when Thomas Payne got the colonists fired up for war with his Common Sense pamphlets. And there is no line today when the media focuses on Barack Obama's race; John McCain's age, Bill Clinton's petulance or any other the other topics that seems to have us hopping mad and casting blame.
Like it or not, it's just the media doing its job -- giving people what they want.
Before we reflexively lay at the feet of media responsibility for the polluting and perverting our electoral process, let's spend some quiet time on definition and context.
The question of definition is basic: what is the media?
There was a time when that answer was simple: three networks, a dozen or so national magazines and a collection of city newspapers and radio stations. They were the gatekeepers.
The gate keepers have gone the way of rotary phones. Power has moved from the center to the edge. Anyone with a laptop can enter -- and even influence -- the national discourse.
Taking on media today is like swatting a cloud.
Context raises a more complex question: what do we really want from media?
There is much that that the media could have done better so far in this election, but in the context of an industry that makes money on aggregating eyeballs, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything they did wrong.
Too much about race? Obama is the first African American to make the finals of the presidential race. So when his long-time preacher damns America to hell -- that sells.
Was there sexism in the coverage of Hillary Clinton? Some.
But her gender worked for her (tearing up to win New Hampshire) more often than it worked against her. Did the media pressure her to leave the race because she was a woman? Or did pressure came from the fact that she stayed on knowing she couldn't win, which raised a question about her motives, which ignited the speculation that media lives for.
Was it fair for the New York Times to run the Obama op-ed and send McCain's back for revisions? Or was it the simple fact that Obama's op-ed was good and McCain's wasn't -- as, if their speeches are any indication, was likely the case.
Is the media ("cable monsters" to McCain) giving Obama rock star coverage because it wants him in the White House? Or does a fresh faced, dark skinned, consummate political performer simply outdraw a respected septuagenarian who David Letterman said "looks like the kind of guy who brags that his new denture adhesive lets him eat corn on the cob."
It's a new world for media -- with a mob of unruly competitors jostling for share with organizations that still check their sources.
It's a new world of politics, energized by a candidate unlike any who came before him.
How can we blame "the media" for stepping out of bounds, when the lines have been washed away like sidewalk chalk in a rainstorm?
If leading this country to a more sophisticated level of political discourse was a viable business model, Meet the Press would be on in prime time, Foreign Affairs would sell more copies than Cosmo and Bill O'Reilly would be hosting a reality show.
But it's not a viable business model. And, as a country, we get what we pay for.
The editorial decision to pound away on a phony assassination attempt [ nobody was even charged] or the Puma's - is just that -- an editorial decision.
We aren't getting the media we want or deserve because we cannot even name the conspirators.
Ask yourselves... what group is powerful enough to control the message with cameras on unhappy whites and cheering blacks? -- what group wanted Hillary or McCain?
This post probably wont make it past the censors because I alluded to some conspiracy... and it is a conspiracy.... by the same people who gave us Bush .... the same people who gave us McCain over Romney... and the same people who want to destroy Obama because he isn't really in their camp.
think hard now..... who has this kind of power... but cannot be named?
THAT is the media we get... and we don't deserve it... but we aren't allowed to talk about it.
THAT is the crime lady.... not that we deserve what we get.
The word “media” is the plural of “medium.”
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/medium
What is reported about MC regularly by the news media? Usually a free airing of his negative ads repeatedly or insertions whenever possible of black and white photos of him in a hospital bed circa Vietnam war.
Ask any citizen on the streets and they may not have seen one good thing about OB (Wright, Ayers, Rezko.) Then ask them what they have seen of MC its his britney and paris ads, clips of him joking with the town hall set. Where is Keating? Where is ex-wife and adultery? Where are clips with Hagee, Falwell, Parsley? Those sound like great stories to me if all they wanted to deliver was sensationalism as she claimed.
This write up sounds very similar to the argument, 'the rape victim brought it on herself'. We, the consumers, are no more responsible for poor media that the rape victim is for her fate.
I'm so tired of this type of 'shared responsibility' trash when we all are being had by corporate america!
perhaps when we present our children with Real Heroes to worship, rather than the celebutards currently on the market, then we will raise a generation prepared to make a real difference in the world.
MSM - Middle School Media
maybe we are ready to graduate!!!
The "media" is sort of a rorschach blot for everyone. The complaints from convervatives are not disengenuous - they really feel the media is biased against them..... as do progressives, etc...
Ultimately, the big pillars or the American Media are still big corporate broadcast networks, but that's changing. We see the slow death of print news happening today and wonder how far this internet thing is going to go as a delivery medium.
Today's landscape is to be sure problematic. "Infotainment" is the law of the day and those "analysts" or "pundit" "rent-a-heads" who appear every night are only there to attract eyeballs which boosts ratings which increases advertising revenue. With another funding model, news would be different but let's be careful here. Different is not per-se good or desirable
If the American People demanded more from news - or more importantly if they sent clear messages to those who sponsor shoddy, inappropriate, or biased content, then the news would transform overnight.
But I agree there is a place for all of it in the landscape - we have to educate our children and our neighbors in the basics of logic and understanding what's fallacious and why. Most of what appears on the nightly news is not fact-based anymore.
Ultimately WE are the grist-mills who have to sort wheat from chaff and that's not changing any time soon.
Since Reagan began deregulation of the media, it has become a powerful tool used by corporations for their own interests.
Media success has relatively little to do with what we, as a public, want, and a lot to do with what is profitable for controlling corporations to have us want. All we as a public do is select from the limited range we are given.
To say that public taste drives the media is naive, IMO.
Check out Why media ownership Matters
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0403-25.htm
As Phil Donahue, the former host of MSNBC's highest-rated show who was fired by the network in February 2003 for bringing on anti-war voices, told "Democracy Now!," "We have more [TV] outlets now, but most of them sell the Bowflex machine. The rest of them are Jesus and jewelry. There really isn't diversity in the media anymore. Dissent? Forget about it."
the talk radio monopoly has had a huge and underestimated influence on the MSM by laundering GOP/rove talking points and framing through its coordinated uncontested repetition to 60MIL Americans. the talk radio monopoly has given false certainty and fake poulism to bush/conservative values and have shifted the media/political center way right of USA's true populist liberal values that appear in study after study.
because media critics and political analysts and progressives don't have access to a searchable talk radio transcript database, and because guys like limbaugh and hannity give them headaches the talk radio effect has been largely ignored. unless you listen once in a while (and there's a station near every American) it is impossible to watch the migration of talking points and myths from talk radio into the MSM and onto the floor of congress.
considering the 20 years lost dealing with global warming and our loss of democracy, ignoring the talk radio monopoly may be the biggest political blunder of all time.
Has the middle class and poor finally figured out what unraveled America? It couldn't possibly be deregulation could it. Regulations were put in place to protect consumers from unscrupulous businesses, utilities, and banks. Too bad we bought into Ronnie's scam. We've been paying for it ever since. And we have the Reagan Democrats to thank along with the conservative movement. I'm still trying to figure out how the Republicans managed to get so many people to vote against their own best interests.
I'll probably die not knowing that too.
This used to bug me, too. The best read I've ever found on this is in Korten's 'The Great Turning', the chapter titled 'Wake-up Call.' You can read excepts on Amazon.
Focus on the Family was formed by theocrats who were POed that Barry Goldwater lost. They invented the whole 'moral majority' agenda to feed false voting issues to conservative Christians in order to avert their attention away from economic issues. By 1990, they had created the radio empire that hired Falwell. Money flowed from those with corporate business interests to think tanks intent on shaping a conservative Christian voting base, and then this unwitting army assaulted the Rep party.
Korten follows the flow of money in precise detail.
I don't require Round tables from so called analyst. The fact is it is not about what America needs and wants, it is more about what America deserves... With election we haven't reached a tipping point where people realize it is too late for being dependent and asking themselves to step up. Everything happens for a reason, after this election cycle if something, it is going to bring us closer to a tipping point. Maybe one more war with Iran and Russia and then we get our own WWIII, we don't need this path to self destruction we deserve it.
"Think for yourself. Question Authority"
With current News media there has been more of repeating the reports than actual reporting. Number of worth while stories that come out may be 2 or 3 in a week but repeating and re analyzing that ,is what media has been doing. "Analyzing is our part" don't analyze and decide for us. Media has been taking this authoritarian role of doing the thinking for us. It is part of dumbing down the generation.
Where was my report for Russian side of Georgian conflict.
where was my report when French troops died last week in Afghanistan
where was my report for French nuclear waste and French Chernobyl when we reference France for nuclear energy.
where was was report for importance about intellectual leadership