If you don't know Fred Hiatt, he's the editor who turned the Washington Post's editorial page into a vocal supporter of the Bush administration with editorials and right-wing columnists like Charles Krauthammer and Robert Novak.
If you don't know Rick Kaplan, he's the guy who turned CNN into Fox News Lite and then moved on to MSNBC and filled that cable channel with conservative pundits like Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough. This was the same time MSNBC fired Phil Donahue, the guy with the highest ratings.
Yes, in a time when the New York Times trumpets the war with Judith Miller and her sole source, Curveball, and when two columnists, one in Texas and one in Oregon, get fired for criticizing George Bush's no-show on 9/11, Dan Rather gets the heave-ho, and General Batiste loses his CBS job because he dares to say bad things about our uber-sensitive petit dauphin, some idiots talk about "the liberal media" as if it's 1974 and Rupert Murdoch is still just a soft-porn purveyor from Oz.
I do think our media is biased. Toward the stupid. Latest case in point is 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl. Watch the video up there as she does the American journalist thing and asks the president of France about his marital difficulties, as if it's anyone's goddamn business but Sarkozy and le squeeze primer.
Now ask yourself what other questions you'd like to ask the president of France. I can think of plenty.
What the fuck has happened to our media? Has America become so infantilized that the only thing that holds our interest is gossip? Have we really become this stupid? Or is it that news departments and their corporate overseers just think we're stupid?
Next time you watch some journalist cover the day's news, think of this: It costs next to nothing to cover events like fires, bombings, press conferences and celebrity fallout. It costs money to investigate ideas, like public policy.
For instance, do you believe, as Kennedy famously said, that you owe something to your country or do you believe, as Milton Friedman and his Republican acolytes do, that we owe nothing to our nation except our success?
Are you your brother's keeper? Or do you say I got mine, now let him get his?
Now there's a question I'd like Leslie Stahl to ask. Unfortunately, she'd probably ask Paris Hilton.
2 comments:
Perfectly said.
"What the fuck has happened to our media? Has America become so infantilized that the only thing that holds our interest is gossip? Have we really become this stupid?"
Yes. It's the only thing that explains Hillary Clinton being ahead in the poles of people with real sense, talent, and integrity, like say Bill Richardson. People are interested in what really constitutes the relationship between her and hubby. Enquiring minds want to know, and the supermarket tabloids don't have the answer. Hillary is the only source for the sordid truth, and she's not telling until she's president.
Our lives are soap operas where only drama matters, not substance. Where have you been? Not only did Johnny fail to learn to read, because he got an A for showing up and knowing his name, but he also was exempted from values because of a behavioral disability.
You asked, "What the fuck has happened to our media?" It reflects us as a society, and we as a society are fucked!
Dread
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