Letters to the Editor
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At Last, Rejecting Being Treated Like Fools?
(Full disclosure: I'm for Edwards.)
If HRC becomes the next President -- rather than comprehending that this is a repudiation of their bias and distortion, the MSM will drag us through years of 'Why Bill Harms Our Country Advising The President', and the kind of sly references to adultery, impeachment and cigars. I don't believe they're smart enough to know what may have just happened in Iowa and New Hampshire.
A Hillary Clinton Presidency would probably result, for much of the MSM, in a new low in Hillary-hating; some 'journalists' may just be hoping for it as a twisted sort of career opportunity. Even so, what the media already has been doing to Hillary, or Obama, just in the past few weeks may not have had the effect they intended.
News editors, reporters and columnists (and the corporations which own them) don't appear to understand or care that "news reporting" in America has become little more than entertainment, a venue for distorted journalism and advertising sales -- and, they don't understand the public may finally be rejecting all of that.
The public would also be rejecting what the MSM's distortion and disrespect of the public represents, and begun to show that in Iowa and New Hampshire where it counts -- at the polls.
As Atrios put it (regarding Maureen Dowd's column about HRC in today's New York Times), "These people [the NYT reporting staff Dowd quoted] are all broken." Chris Matthews' shallow remarks on CNN last night (currently making the rounds in YouTube clips) showed me he's oblivious to the effect of his loud, empty commentary.
David Brooks, O'Reilly, Tom Friedman, Novak, Joe Klein; Time and Newsweek, CNN and Fox... all of 'these people' Atrios described, the media venues which serve up inflated egoism and distortion as hard news, are daily becoming less relevant than they like to believe they are in shaping American culture and influencing events. The fringe rantings of a Limbaugh or Wiener, Coulter or Malkin, are already irrelevant.
A majority of people in the United States are desperate to escape from a culture dominated by an agenda personified in seven years of Cheney / Bush. Things are changing. But, as usual, the corporate media doesn't, and won't, understand this. According to the corporate managers, the news directors, editors and pundits, we're a gullible, easily-led mob of Rubes who will accept whatever line they choose to sell, between commercials.
Tom Brokaw, at least, has had some experience in a journalism that reported facts, the truth of events, and stood by them rather than allowing them to be obscured in a sea of right-wing talking points. Brokaw's mentors in the business understood and remembered Edward R. Murrow.
Perhaps Brokaw retained enough of that to make his cautious observations to Chris Matthews -- to whom Murrow, Menken or Cronkite are only names.