Replies

No, we did not, and I suspect you know it.

Yes, it was the same media. The same faces on the same networks. The same.

In those elections there was a feeble pretense of objectivity, a thin veneer of pretended balance.

When the campaign started, McCain called the media his "base." The reporters were overflowing about stories of how great it was to travel on the "Straight Talk Express" and have cocoa. If there was any media bias in this election, it started as pro-McCain.

A lot of people are whining about the media because it didn't do what they wanted it to do. Oh boo hoo.

An example was the Ayers story. Sorry to break it to you, but "Obama pals around with terrorists," is a subjective judgment, not a news story. The news story was that Obama was on the board of a charitable organization with a guy who has spent the last two decades or so being a respected university professor. I tried (diplomatically) to point this out several times in discussions here, but oh no, this Ayers connection was a silver bullet that was going to take down Obama. Bzzt. Wrong.

Then there were all of the items that were just plain ludicrous. The birth certificate BS, the allegations that Ayers wrote Obama's books. That was just retarded. Some Freepers even did an analysis trying to prove the book connection and all they proved was that two works in English will have a lot of the same words. Real experts in detecting plagiarism and ghost writing found no evidence that Ayers penned the books. But oh no, we were going to show the world that Obama was a Kenyan crook.

The media in this country tells people what they want to hear. That's how it works. That's what Rush Limbaugh does. Look back at what he said over the course of the election. Was he right about anything? Were the geniuses at National Review or the Weekly Standard? These are conservative media (explicitly) and they didn't serve anybody any better than the drive-bys.

Is the media broken? Yes, but we need to work around it, not attack it. We need to stop thinking of it as if it were a predator, and think of it more like a parasite. A predator is out to get you; a parasite just does what it does and causes harm.

We can spend the next four years flogging the narratives that so many go attached to ("Obama is a Muslim!" No, he's not) and we can lose again in 2012. And we can blame the media again. Maybe we should pay attention to what's going on in the world and respond to it instead of making of character attacks on people. What if, in the wake of the economic crisis, McCain had actually presented an economic plan that was different from Bush and showed the country how it would be better than Obama? What if he had done that instead of just attacking Obama with vague, broad allegation of "socialism"? He would have won in a landslide.