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Friday, August 22, 2003 |
As the Media Turns
Whether you believe the press has a liberal bias or a conservative one, one thing is clear: it has a bias in favor of the simple and the sensational. Once the press has its "storyline," a pack mentality takes over and everything is interpreted through the prism of the prevailing narrative. That's certainly what happened in the coverage of the 2000 Presidential campaign, as the media learned its lines about "Al the fabricator" (an angle generously provided by the RNC) early on and never let truth get in the way of yet another reminder about the infamous (and inaccurate) "invented the Internet" comment.
Well, that dynamic can be a two-edged sword, as I believe our Republican friends are about to find out. The word of the day is "failure," as in, "The Administration's Iraq policy is clearly a ____" (because, among other things, they were either deliberately or accidentally wrong about everything they said, and now it's being proven by the day). Whether the policy is a genuine disaster or not may, in fairness, be too early to say. But if that becomes the narrative, the Prez is in big trouble, because the story will become a drumbeat, then a tarbaby.
It remains to be seen if the press will take up this spin in full voice (see E.J. Dionne in today's Washington Post for a nice sample) or will be reluctant to reverse its record of suppine cheerleading and cowering before the White House. But no, that would require some shame and self-scrutiny, and this is the press we're talking about.
10:12:41 AM 
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Idiot Alert
I feel sorry for the good people of Alabama, being represented now in the media by raving moron (and State Supreme Court Chief Justice) Roy Moore. How dumb is this guy, with his Ten Commandments statue? I caught a clip from the MSNBC program, The Abrams Report, where he was being interviewed by guest-host Catherine Crier and his responses to simple questions were so senseless and incoherent that even a relatively conservative screaming-head cable chat-show host could not conceal her indcredulity. Check out the transcript here for a bracing example of how low our political discourse has sunk.
9:58:00 AM
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Laugh While You Can
I couldn't help myself. I bought Al Franken's book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, from my neighborhood bookstore last night, where they unsealed a crate of first editions to outlet before a possible court ruling. I will restrain myself, for the moment, from quoting large portions of it. But trust me, it's all that. Between Franken, Conason, Alterman, Blumenthal et. al., the intelligent left is mobilized to an extent I haven't seen in my lifetime. Thanks, Fox, for bringing the smart, tough critics out of the woodwork - to bash you for your lies and stupidity!
9:50:02 AM
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© Copyright 2004 Rob Salkowitz.
Last update: 9/27/2004; 5:34:41 PM.
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