Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Yeah, the News Media does kind of suck...

I keep hearing about this video in which Sarah Palin says that the press was harder on her than it has been on Caroline Kennedy due to ''class bias''. A few things:

1. I find Palin excruciatingly boring, which is why I didn't write about her during the election. Some people love her; some people hate her; I just don't care one way or the other. I will listen to this interview at some point in the future, perhaps in lieu of anaesthesia before a root canal.

2. Secondly, I can't say if the media is too soft on Caroline Kennedy, or if they were too hard on Sarah Palin, because I would frankly rather watch leprosy-related pornography than any of the news programs.

3. However, I'm willing to bet that Governor Mooseburger is dead right on this one. We've talked here before about how vacuous journalism, particularly cable journalism, has become. There's a reason for this. In the old days, a journalist was essentially an outsider with a relatively antagonistic relationship with those in power. Now we have a situation in which Washington politicians and journalists run in the same packs. They go to the same bars, take their kids to the same schools, and generally come from the same socio-economic group. They pal around. Journalists are now insiders, which is why so much journalism reads like celebrity puff pieces, or what you might have once read in Pravda.

4. It's likely that Palin was an outsider in that world and so didn't get the usual sucking-up, which she apparently expected.

5. Liberals complain about a ''sycophantic corporate'' media; conservatives complain about the ''elitist liberal media''; ultimately, they're talking about the same thing. I think they would prefer something like what you have in a banana republic, in which the party props up a pretty face and has them go through a series of correographed photo ops. I'd imagine that's what Palin would have prefered to ''media scrutiny''.

6. Sadly for Democrats and Republicans, the United States is a democracy, in which we need the press to rake people like Sarah Palin and Caroline Kennedy- and remember that it's New York that is having this empty shell of a carpetbagger thrust upon us- over the coals. They need to grill public officials- all of them, because none of us proles can do it for them. This tendency of the press to treat politicians like celebrities, until the public complains loud enough, is not helping their dying industry.

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