The media is failing us
There is something I am noticing in this political cycle that is really starting to annoy me. It might have been around before, but this is the first time I have really noticed it. Go and watch TV news outlets and take notice of what they are talking about. You will begin to notice that they are not actually ever talking about the qualifications or stances of the candidates. They never really get around to talking about exactly what the candidates are planning on doing for the economy or foreign relations or education. What we hear from the TV news outlets is how people are going to respond to their stances. They don’t talk about what McCain wants to do for the energy crysis. They talk about how rural Americans as opposed to senior citizen women as opposed to young white collar workers perceive McCain’s stance on dealing with energy. How do we expect to properly elect the right candidate when we aren’t ever hearing anything about who the candidates really are?
Add to this the fact that with their need to fill air time, news of outrage and terrible things have to be basically created from nothing, and sometimes from less than that. One person makes some comment. It is then taken out of context and twisted and then anchors around the country can get all up in a tivy and demand apologies from everyone and their mother. The newest example of this is based on a Wesley Clark statement. You need to just watch the video which plays his original comment, and then shows the media reaction to it. The media was trying to say we should be outraged by him, but in fact I found myself quite mad at them for completely misleading the American people. The condensed version of the video is that Wesley Clark, who is a retired general, actually praised McCain’s military service, but then, correctly in my mind, said that his military service is not automatically a qualification for being president. From this, we see anchor after anchor wondering, “How dare Clark belittle McCain’s service to the country?” To top this off, they then try to push this outrange on do Obama. Why is it that presidential candidates are now responsible for any and everything their supporters say? Clark is in no way connected with the Obama campaign, and there is no reason for his comments to be connected with Obama, as Clark himself said in his response.
Now that I have thought about it, I have seen this sort of political situation before. The race for American president has almost completely devolved to the level of high school class president elections. We have been divided into our cliches by the media so we can do our voting as a group. We just have older women, and middle class white men, and southern evangelicals instead of jocks, and nerds, and goths. And we are doing our best to ignore actual issues and instead go with the basis of class elections where all we hear is “I totally heard from the girlfriend of my best friends brother, that candidate A said that blah blah blah.”
May the most popular guy with the least controversal supporters win.