Letters to the Editor
-
Just Say “No”
There certainly seems to be a market for the MSM product, and a lot of people here seem to be part of it. One of Glenn Greenwald’s hats is that of MSM critic. He does a good job of it, and one hopes that new readers are steadily finding his work and thinking about the points which he makes so very well. For the rest of us, we regular readers who are already in agreement with Greenwald’s position, here is my suggestion: QUIT CONSUMING THE PRODUCT WHICH WE HATE SO MUCH. The makers don’t care whether you ‘like’ it or ‘hate’ it- just whether you ingest it. As long as enough people do, they will keep churning it out. Don’t like Chris Matthews? Neither do I. Why is it you can tell me exactly what he said on T.V. last night? Oh, you were watching? Allow me the temerity to suggest that, perhaps, just a little, you get a little charge from watching Matthews be such an ass. It gets you fired up, and provides you with some fodder for your rant on Salon the next day.
The MSM is not going to go away or change because they were ‘humiliated’ by last nights election results being so divergent from what the MSM predicted. The MSM will go away or change when the MSM business model ceases to be profitable, and it will cease to be profitable when people stop watching. Greenwald has to consume the stuff; it is his job. What is our excuse?
-
It's good that we have Glen
to report on the commentary of the commentary of the caucuses and primaries--
silly to think one would actually GO there to report it himself.
played Pssssst...........?
(pass it-by other name)
silly me-you are now.
-
@talesofunrest
Good points. Unless your TV is one that Nielson uses to come up with its ratings, what we watch or don't watch doesn't affect their business model. What advertisers we support can although the impact of that is lost on the companies paying for the advertising because they have no way of knowing about our decision sans a large boycott mailing campaign.
-
Missed an "or"
boycott OR mailing campaign
-
The Polling vs. the Results Explained:
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS
The data comes from Politico.
More on the machines used here:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2008/010808_vote_fraud.htm
-
Say No? Yes.
@ talesofunrest,
I live in the San Francisco Bay area; it's a fairly saturated media market. While I have a television (analog), I use it primarily to watch DVDs. I don't have cable or dish, and the number of channels I have is limited by the teevee's ability to pick up a signal.
About ten years ago, I consciously got out of the habit of watching episodic television (The last of 'The X Files', 'Heroes' and the first two seasons of 'Lost' have been the only exceptions). Public television is good, but I won't watch American network news -- BBC news is available nightly through our local PBS station, and Deutsche Welle's English-language nightly teevee news is available on another local cable access channel.
People can wean themselves from the glass teat if they actually want to.
-
Dumb and dumber
My political awareness only goes back to the mid-70s, but I believe I've seen a clear deterioration in news reporting since the mid-90s. It is their normalization of idiocy, and their total lack of embarrassment, that seems different (and worse) than in the past. -- Holly McLachlan
Mine goes back to the mid-50s, but my sense of what is happening is essentially the same as yours. This may seem a bizarre sort of mental connection, but I'm reminded of Paul Rosenberg's numbered list of stages in the evolution of self-reflecting consciousness. As I remember, there were five levels or so, corresponding, in modern times, to how much an individual perceives of those meta-levels of cognition which have gradually been added to human consciousness since we were all hunter-gatherers.
When I look at the confluence of 24/7/365 news, lowered educational standards and pay scales, the industrialization of lowest-common-denominator manipulation tools developed originally by consumer marketing experts, and finally, the terminal consolidation of media ownership, it doesn't surprise me that journalism, and the people it claims to serve, have descended Paul Rosenberg's meta-consciousness scale en masse.
Yes, I do believe that the process is accelerating, but so also is the resistance to it, which appears first as irony, then as disgust, and finally as outright hostility. Check the tone of Glenn's posts on the subject over the past couple of years. He's become damned angry, and believe me, he's not alone.
-
QUIT CONSUMING THE PRODUCT WHICH WE HATE SO MUCH
Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. I haven't watched a TV news broadcast (except in line at the bank) since November 2004, and yet I remain intensely interested in their contents.
I think yestersday's vote highlights to great extent, The TV coverage is no less a part of our political process than any other aspect and there's no doubt in my mind that a big part of Hillary's success was due to the perception that she was poorly treated.
IOW, I don't need to watch TV to be profoundly affected by it.
-
Chris Matthews IS RIGHT FOR HIS ROLE AS A BLOATED IMBECILE.....
Chris Matthews is a LOUDMOUTH BLOWHARD, as are most all of the other MSM Media/Reporters who are SMUG, PONTIFICATING PILES of POOP and PUS who feel it is their GOD-GIVEN RIGHT to ACT as the BE-ALL, END-ALL and ULTIMATE ARBITERS and MOUTHPIECES of the ELECTORAL and POLITICAL PROCESSES. They BELIEVE that THEY MUST ACT as the PABLUM DISPENSERS who MASH-UP THE TRUTH SO IT IS MORE PALATABLE to us "babies" of their viewing evidence SO WE CAN BETTER DIGEST THEIR DRECK and SLUDGE, WHICH WOULDN'T QUALIFY EVEN AS TOXIC WASTE, THAT IS HOW POLLUTED and FILTHY IT IS!!!!! Then IDIOTS like Chris Matthews TOADY to WORTHLESS CREEPS like John McPAIN, GLOMMING his FAT LIPS UNTO McPAIN's FUNDAMENT LIKE A GIGANTIC GROTESQUE BLOATED LEECH and SINGING McPAIN's PRAISES TO THE SKIES LIKE A DEMENTED TROUBADOUR OUT OF A BIZARRE MEDIEVAL PANORAMA!!!!! LAUGHABLE AND DISGUSTING IN THE EXTREME!!!!!
-
And who is noting Edwards' own huge increase in NH votes since 2004?
Glenn,
You could still extend your example from yesterday about Edwards, but I'm willing to bet not one single MSM reporter will care to even notice this, much less point it out:
Edwards remains "on the rise" in a way synchronous with the national polling data that you presented yesterday. Yes, it was disappointing to Edwards' supporters that he didn't do better than he did with 17% but that sentence should say "even better" in light of his own progress among New Hampshire voters.
He received nearly twice as many votes as he did in New Hampshire in 2004, going from 26,000 to 48,000, which, given the overall increase in voters meant going from 12% to 17%. That too is significant, although given the agenda of the MSM, it will, I bet, never show up at all, so "lost" in the obsession over this being a Clinton-Obama race, period.
I think it's safe to say that Southerners have tended to have an extra hurdle to mount in NH primaries. In 1992, the very time when placing 2nd made Bill Clinton the "comeback kid," Clinton received 41,540 votes (compared to Tsongas' 55,000). That 1992 Bill Clinton vote count is 6,500 FEWER votes than Edwards received there yesterday.
It all depends on what the media choose to focus on. If they single-mindedly focus only on horse-race results and do not see under the first-place finishes what other data are there to mine which may stand in some contradiction to the more simplistic storyline, then that too is part of the problem. Sure, Hillary is lead story today, but is her new "comeback kid" story the ONLY story out of NH?
Why can't the media just as easily be saying, Wow, Edwards finished 2nd in Iowa over Clinton despite being vastly outspent, now he nearly doubled his numbers in New Hampshire over his previous election, if he can repeat his victory of 2004 in South Carolina (despite the media bandwagon for his opponents), he's just as much in this race as anyone.