Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

A media rant

If you're understandably a little confused, and even angry, about how the media is now behaving in an irrational manner, as usual Atrios sums it up nicely:
The longer version is that the entire Washington press corps has, since Clinton, been fellating the Republican power structure. The great thing about the Republican power structure is that it doesn't go away, it just sets up shop in DC office buildings and continues its symbiotic relationship with conservative lickspittles like Mark Halperin, Andrea Mitchell, John Solomon, Steno Sue Schmidt, Gwen Ifill, Karen Tumulty, and the rest of the gang of 500 wankers. It's a structural issue which will not go away no matter how many Democrats win elections. It's how this generation of journalists, if we generously call them that, was trained. It's in their genetic code.
You can be forgiven, loyal reader, for not understanding why the media, a week from the midterms, suddenly decides to focus on placating conservatives.

Basically it's fear.

Conservatives are going to scream even louder than usual starting on Nov. 8 that they would have done better if not for "the MSM." And they will keep that screaming up until 2008. So the media will, as usual, search out any and all minor gaffes, errors and ginned-up outrages to show media "balance."

It really is quite peculiar. Some kind of weird Stockholm syndrome combined with massive insecurity I guess. The focus on minutiae is truly astounding. We lost over 100 troops in October, who in their right mind is focusing on possible copyright law violations as a flipping serious campaign issue?

Do you hear much talk in the media that Bush should apologize? Of course not, because questioning the Preznit would bring down another cavalcade of noise machine attacks that the media would dearly love to avoid. Inside every reporter must lurk the secret fear that they might become the next target.

There's a hint and maybe then some of violence in the air, after all. Maybe it's best to throw the neo-cons and theocrats a few bones.

Of course, the real news of the day is that we are so screwed in Iraq that it's not even funny. But somehow finding a soldier takes a back seat to attacking John Kerry. Kerry is thankfully fighting back.

Support the troops indeed.

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