Just when you thought the New York Times couldn't sink any lower than its chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger ranting how he was sorry America wasn't a socialist and pacifist nation, the money-losing paper manages to surprise you.Posted on 04/04/2007 9:56:04 AM PDT by RatherBiased.com
Just when you thought the New York Times couldn't sink any lower than its chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger ranting how he was sorry America wasn't a socialist and pacifist nation, the money-losing paper manages to surprise you.
That's really the only thing you can say after reading Times Arts tv critic Alessandra Stanley's attempt to cast the popular-but-fading Fox show "American Idol" into the 2000 election controversy.
Yes, you read that correctly. According to the Times, the reason that teenage girls looove tuning in is because Al Gore didn't beat George W. Bush.
The lunacy is just too funny:
“Idol,” now in its sixth season, has its selection process backward. In this country, people can vote for whomever they want — even Al Gore in 2000 — but the last word is left to the Electoral College and even the justices of the Supreme Court.
The most interesting thing about this season’s ado is not Mr. Malakar or Mr. Stern or even Simon Cowell; it’s the current obsession with voting on television shows and Internet sites like YouTube.
“Idol,” which began as a British hit, made its debut in the United States in 2002 — a scant two years after one of the closest presidential elections in American history. The talent show spawned a multitude of copycat shows with voter call-in gimmicks; even CBS News allows viewers to decide which story Steve Hartman will cover on his weekly segment, “Assignment America.” (This week, they chose the National Dog Agility Championships in Sunbury, Ohio.)
The high viewer turnout for “Idol,” which is on tonight, cannot solely be explained by technological advances or a regression in human nature. It cannot be a coincidence that television voting rights arose so soon after the 2000 election left slightly more than half the voting population feeling cheated. Those who didn’t go to the polls and fear that their abstention inadvertently made possible the invasion of Iraq may feel even worse. “Idol” could be a displacement ritual: a psychological release that allows people to vote — and even vote often — in a contest that has no dangerous or even lasting consequences. (Even losers win out in the end: both Mr. Gore and Jennifer Hudson ended up on the Oscar stage.)
Maybe the reason that more people didn’t turn out for the 2004 presidential race, despite the closeness of the tally four years earlier, is that they were still in denial and distracted by “American Idol.”
Hat tip: Chris Judd
The New York Times is known for inserting their bias into reportage where it doesnt belong. This is the kind of BS that passes for journalism, for example, use a weather story to bash Bush about climate change policy. The New Yorker is infamous for it as well, full-blown BDS page after page in just about any story. My God, the New York intelligensia must have spent the last 6 years thinking about the many ways they hate Bush.
This is a great example of such an obsession leading to an absurdity.
Alessandra is a real nut-job commie, and every time she’s exposed as such, she just gets worse.
Last ratings I saw, "American Idol" was on top.
If people were really that upset about the result of the 2000 election, we would have seen mass protests and riots in the streets. In reality, most Americans took it in stride.
One other thing that did NOT happen: There was no huge push to eliminate the electoral college. If there were really a groundswell of discontent over the election outcome, we would have seen a serious move to change the system. No one even talks about that anymore. Of course, if Kerry had taken Ohio, and the presidency, in 2004 while losing the national vote, these far left whiners would have been quite content.
Alessandra Stanley's brain
Television Voting Rights?
He’s got problems right at the beginning of that paragraph, 04 turn out was huge. Kerry got more votes than any candidate before and still managed to lose. 12 million more votes were cast in 2004 than in 2000. OK we still haven’t cracked 50% of the overall populace but 2004 is a bad year to pick for people not turning out to vote.
OK, so which Idol contestant is Alessandra voting for, and how often? The only way this nutjob analysis makes any sense is that she has cooked up some desperate rationalization for why she is speed-dialing the Idol number for two hours every Tuesday. “It’s because I got disenfranchised in 2000! Yeah, that makes sense!”
I am a Democrat who voted for Gore in the 2000 election. Although initially disappointed with the results (I later changed my mind), I did, in fact, take the results in stride and never felt that the election was stolen.
One thing that the left has never noticed: There were only three states that changed hands (parties) between the 2000 and 2004 elections: Iowa, New Mexico and New Hampshire. All were very close both times. But Bush won Florida fairly substantially in 2004: 52% to 47%, if memory serves me correctly. This indicates to me that he probably did win in 2000 (and if the state hadn’t been called prematurely for Gore, he would’ve won by a larger margin).
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