Reason and Radical

Horse Race -- NOT!

The media seems to have no way of covering the presidential election except as a horse race. Obama is up by 15% in the latest Newsweek poll, but the way the media (and by that I mainly mean TV news which is how most Americans get what little news they get) is playing it, you'd think it was a dead heat.

I think the reason for this is their own self-interest (and their distorted view of "fairness" in which "both sides" of any issue gets equal play, even when that isn't deserved as in the case of global warming). The media wants a close race to make it interesting to them.

Most of the members of the celebrity driven media have no interest in policy and they are lazy. So they rarely do stories about policy and instead do personality pieces and stupid stuff like "Obama has a problem with (fill in the blank -- suburban women, Latinos, blue collar men) voters" to make it seem like this thing is close.

This is also why you hear people say there is no difference between the parties or you hear "oh, they both do that" when the Repugnicants do something outrageous or offensive. No, actually, there are HUGE differences, but again the media doesn't spend any time on this.

The reason I am so attracted to Obama is that he is calling the media out on this as he runs a very different campaign. I heard him the other day say something along the lines of "you may not know about my plans for such-and-such but you know that I might be a Muslim and that I have a feisty wife." No wonder many non-Americans consider us not the brightest voters in the booth.

posted by Leimodnu @ 9:50 AM