Re: Grinding Away..Things that grind your gears, part three
Network news simplistic coverage about Politics is grinding my gears. Journalism is dead. (OK, the funeral for it was awhile ago but sometimes I forget) Not a commentary on the politics of it so much as inaccurate and all or nothing reporting. 2 yrs ago one side has a mandate. Now the other side does. Hello...neither one has a real majority in the whole country. So why do we have half the news and a lot of the news magazine things covering the changes that will happen and how the entire country wants X. If the 'whole country' felt the same way why do we have elections? Has anyone actually figured out the % of reps who are tea partiers compared to the rest of the more 'traditional' Reps? Kind of like saying you are renovating the entire subdivision when someone is redoing their bathroom. Almost worse than when we get the other half of the news covering Lohan being out of rehab while there are people dying in Afghanistan.
You're basically right (just for the sake of discussion I'm overlooking your Tea Party paranoia). Ironically, with more options than ever before, we've got to work harder than ever to find the middle ground (assuming we're actually looking for it). We are up to our lips in faux "balance," on the networks. Say the issue is Chinese political repression in Tibet. The nets will give us the Dali Llama and some guy named Huang Loo, who's a bus boy at a Georgetown all you can eat buffet. "We had balance, we had people on both sides of the issue," they'll scream. And just as they have since the advent of television, the networks will provide us a daily condensed version of the front page of the New York Times, including all of the "newsatorials."
The tabloidization of network news is nearly total. Again, the Times showed the way. Remember the rape trial of Willie Smith? Florida permits live coverage of trials. But to protect the identity of the victim, she was shown with a blue dot covering her face, and the Times went along. However, when the National Enquirer outed her, the times dutifully reported that fact, along with her name. So much for America's paper of record having higher standards than the tabs. The networks have fallen into line behind the Times. And cable is no better in that regard.
Local TV news is a vulgar disaster area and should be avoided by anyone with a room temperature or better IQ.
There is an awful lot of pontificating about how we should "work across the aisle," to get things done. Most of the people who suggest this are fourflushers and are just throwing red meat to the rubes. They're saying what they think we want to hear, with no intention of actually doing it.
There was a time when you'd occasionally see cooperation: When LBJ needed help getting the civil rights bill of '64 past the southern democrats, he got together with republican leader Ev Dirksen, and those two old lions of the Senate worked out the deal that got the bill passed. I don't know if we would see such cooperation these days on anything less than going to war. And maybe not even then. In the runup to the first Gulf war, the entire democrat leadership in both houses voted "no." Only Sam Nunn and Les Aspin's "yes" votes gave enough democrats political cover to vote "yes" themselves. More's the pity.
