2 posts tagged “journalism”

Roger Simon wrote a piece dripping with sarcasm for Politico today.  And I love it.

Focusing on the outcry over the media coverage Sarah Palin has been receiving since the announcement about her taking the Republican VP slot last week, Simon perfectly enunciates what I never could in my severely limited attempts at voicing my opinions:

…On behalf of the elite media, I would like to say we are very sorry.   We have asked questions this week that we should never have asked.  We have asked pathetic questions like: Who is Sarah Palin? What is her record? Where does she stand on the issues? And is she qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?

…We should stop making with all the questions already. She gave a really good speech. And why go beyond that? As we all know, speeches cannot be written by others and rehearsed for days. They are true windows to the soul.  Unless they are delivered by Barack Obama, that is. In which case, as Palin said Wednesday, speeches are just a “cloud of rhetoric.”

…Sarah Palin wanted the media to report on her teenage son, Track, who enlisted in the Army on Sept. 11, 2007, and soon will deploy to Iraq.  Sarah Palin did not want the media to report on her teenage daughter, Bristol, who is pregnant and unmarried.  Sarah Palin thinks that one is good for her campaign and one is not, and that the media should report only on what is good for her campaign. That is our job, and that is our duty. If that is not actually in the Constitution, it should be. (And someday may be.)

On the other hand, I think that a portion of the coverage Palin has received is unfair.  And, apparently, some of Hillary Clinton’s aides agree with me:

Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen, who has written best-selling books on gender differences, said she agrees with complaints that Palin skeptics — including prominent voices in the news media — have crossed a line by speculating about whether the Alaska governor is neglecting her family in pursuit of national office.

“What we’re dealing with now, there’s nothing subtle about it,” said Tannen. “We’re dealing with the assumption that child-rearing is the job of women and not men. Is it sexist? Yes.”

“There’s no way those questions would be asked of a male candidate,” said Howard Wolfson a former top strategist for Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Ultimately, I like Palin.  A lot.

But there’s still no way in hell that I’d ever attached my vote to a McCain campaign.  The fact that they managed to find someone to run in the VP position who would do much better headlining the ticket doesn’t change the fact that McCain is a slimeball with nothing better to do than sell Americans out at the domestic level while playing up his foreign policy credentials.  If we’re going to have four more years of mismanaged policy at home, why not put it all in the lap of someone as easy to write-off as Barack Obama?

Barring the possibility of McCain dropping out of the race in the next two months for age-related reasons, I will continue to throw my vote in for a post-Obamalyptic dystopian future where Americans are finally shaken back to reality.

Yeah, it sounds bad, but we have a nasty tendency of finding order only after chaos.  Just look at Carter and his inspiration for Reagan.

Here's some interesting news: the student newspaper at Colorado State University is under fire because of a short editorial they printed yesterday.  The editorial is included below in it's entirety:

Taser this...FUCK BUSH (source)

According to the editorial board at the paper, this was printed only after hours of deliberation and discussion on the merits of free speech.  Since it's publication, a little more than 24 hours ago, the paper has lost about $30,000 in advertising.  Looks like they might have actually learned the same lesson that Andrew Meyer learned on Monday at the end of a taser gun - free speech is certainly a freedom, but it comes at a price.

Just like Meyer, the paper pushed head-on with their opinion without considering the format in which it was being presented.  While Meyer made the unfortunate choice to format his opinion in an aggressive and unpredictable way while in the presence of a security-ridden Senator, the editorial staff at the Rocky Mountain Collegian made the unfortunate choice of publishing their opinion in a publication that requires advertising support in order to function.
Yet, oddly, I doubt that we'll hear anyone out there complain that the editorial staff is being victimized by Advertiser Brutality.  Go figure.

What's more troubling than all of this, though, is that in the environment of intellectualism that a state university should provide, a group of young adults with the know-how to produce a student-run paper are still ignorant enough to associate George Bush with the tasering of Meyer.  Don't they know that it was a John Kerry speech?
Then again, maybe those cops were actually Secret Service...