Letters to the Editor
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IT'S THE MEDIA, STUPID
Gary Kamiya’s post today, and Glenn Greenwald’s of yesterday both cite the media as “partially” to blame for the state of American politics today. I totally agree with Kamiya’s point about Wright’s sermons, that, taken in context, they’re not really that bad. The mainstream media is really to blame for the Wright fiasco: they took what had probably been running in the Right Wing Noise Machine blogosphere for a couple of weeks, and turned it into an incessant running of the same two snippets of two sermons, over and over and over.
I think the media is totally to blame for the state of American politics and political discourse today. What had been a thoughtful and insightful media, back in the days of the late 1950s and 1960s, has turned into the instant mush that now passes for media and news reporting. We never have really dealt with the change of the media from newsprint to television. The economics of news departments has gone from a public-service oriented enterprise, to a profit-is-king enterprise, with the predictable result that only sensational news gets published or televised.
I don’t have an answer for this, other than to support Barack Obama as a presidential candidate, in hopes that his “different” style will survive the RWNM onslaught of the last couple of weeks.