Claims of fraud in NH seem to be premised on the notion that the news media is a competent body [View All]

[WilliamPitt]

Seems kinda antithetical to the 43,998,213,932,768,443,554,665,221 DU posts that have pointed out exactly the opposite since January 2001.

But Glenn Greenwald says it better.

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Brokaw's sudden, embarrassment-driven request for the media to act differently (where has his sermon been for the last 20 years?) will not have the slightest effect on what they do. It can't, because the media stars and their editors and producers who shape coverage aren't capable of anything else. They're selected and in those positions precisely because this is all they're capable of doing.

Are Gloria Borger and Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman and Wolf Blitzer suddenly going to abandon their desire to impose shallow, melodramatic narratives on our elections and spend their time, instead, analyzing the candidates' responses to Charlie Savage's questionnaire on presidential power, or the dominant, corrosive role lobbyists and large corporations play in our political culture, or the widening rich-poor gap, or the strain and stain on our country from our imperial policies? The question is so absurd, so laughable, that to ask it is to answer it. None of them could remotely do that even if they wanted to, even if they were allowed to, and they don't and aren't.

As I wrote the other day after Mike Huckabee's Iowa win, which was preceded by our media geniuses' collective, condescending declarations of his death:

It's a reminder that the political prattle that spews forth from group-think media stars without end and which consumes our political dialogue for a full year is based on absolutely nothing. Also, most predictive "analysis" from the media stars' cousins, the cogs in the right-wing noise machine, is merely self-absorbed wishful thinking masquerading as objective knowledge. . . .

One knows much more by ignoring and tuning all of this out. But for a full year, our mainstream political dialogue is filled with all of this -- in every leading political magazine and news show -- at the expense of anything that is actually real.

But none of this can be different, at least not in the short-term. Our entire media edifice is structured to operate the Drudgian Freak Show and its stars are the ringleaders, chosen for their affinity for it. In that sense, Matthews really is right and Brokaw absurdly wrong, almost delusional. If our media stars ceased spewing the type of worthless (though destructive) chatter that (when directed at Hillary Clinton) has been more apparent in the last week than it has been for a long time, they'd be left with nothing to do. As Matthews says, if they didn't do that, they might as well stay home. It's who they are.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

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Some other thoughts from Atrios:

Clinton

The Great Orange Satan:

The more she's attacked on personal grounds, the more sympathy that real person will generate, the more votes she'll win from people sending a message to the media and her critics that they've gone way over the line of common decency. You underestimate that sympathy at your own peril. If I found myself half-rooting for her given the crap that was being flung at her, is it any wonder that women turned out in droves to send a message that sexist double-standards were unacceptable? Sure, it took one look at Terry McAuliffe's mug to bring me back down to earth, but most people don't know or care who McAuliffe is. They see people beating the shit out of Clinton for the wrong reasons, they get angry, and they lash back the only way they can -- by voting for her.

I don't know if reaction to the media treatment of Clinton had anything to do with voter choices yesterday, but I certainly know people in real life who a) don't want Clinton to win and b) are tempted to vote for her every time they're exposed to the way she's treated by the deeply broken monsters in our mainstream media.

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2008_01_06_archive.html#2217731319718759591

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Do you trust the news media to do a good and reputable job of campaign coverage? Do you trust their polling procedures? Do you trust anything they say or do?

If you answser "No," "No," and "No" to the above...well...there you go.

Just a thought. I am ready for my beating now.