I only watched the first 10 minutes or so of the Obama/Clinton debate last night, but I still had a hunch that it was going to be a new lowpoint for these things. It's quite remarkable that the main media story about the debate today is the disgusting way Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos conducted themselves, instead of anything a candidate actually said.
The reaction among the mainstream media is amusing. Kinda reminds me of when a bunch of inmates in a prison - all criminals themselves - decide to punish the inmate who just arrived to serve time for a particularly heinous crime. They know they're all guilty, but there are still lines that can be crossed.
There's an article (open letter, actually) in the Philadelphia Daily News that does a good job of summing up why last night's debate and campaign coverage in general has gotten so offensive.
I won't get into it more, because I'm not even really sure if we should be blaming the media, the policians, or ourselves for this garbage. But I do envy certain people who will be able to spend coming months in far away places where the most offensive media looks like this, this, this, or my personal favourite as always, this.
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1 comment:
Thanks, Mike, for posting the letter. Really good to hear a journalist own up to a job poorly done. I'm really sad at the state of the media. Feed fed and lazy.
Hopefully this call to arms will do something:
"Quickly, a word to any and all of my fellow journalists who happen to read this open letter: This. Must. Stop. Tonight, if possible. I thought that we had hit rock bottom in March 2003, when we failed to ask the tough questions in the run-up to the Iraq war. But this feels even lower. We need to pick ourselves up, right now, and start doing our job -- to take a deep breath and remind ourselves of what voters really need to know, and how we get there, that's it's not all horse-race and "gotcha." Although, to be blunt, I would also urge the major candidates in 2012 to agree only to debates that are organized by the League of Women Voters, with citizen moderators and questioners. Because we have proven without a doubt in 2008 that working journalists don't deserve to be the debate 'deciders.'"
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