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Intro: I apologize in advance. The CNN coverage of tonight’s primaries and caucuses was really tame and responsible compared to the media atrocity I documented on MSNBC, so this will be pretty boring. You may not even want to read it, unless you are like me, and you are interested in the corporate media in the United States. I think the difference between CNN and NBC is CNN does not have General Electric telling it “Our major contractor, the Pentagon wants John McCain elected president so get to work turning that sow’s ear into a silk purse.”
After MONSTER Super Tuesday I couldn’t take any more of MSNBC’s biased election coverage. If I heard one more GE employee call John McCain a maverick I was going to hurl my beef tacos from Melis Taqueria, and they are too good to waste. Plus, you would have to have been born yesterday to think that the Hillary bashing was going to stop, just because poor David Schuster had been nailed to a cross to pay for Chris Matthews’ sins and soothe Joe Scarborough’s ruffled feathers.
At 4 PM CST, I turned the TV to CNN for the first time since 2006, when I swore off Ted Turner’s old news network. At that time, Screaming Chicken Wolf Blitzer and Co. were offering Terra Warnings du Jour. The last one I remember was something about an imminent dirty bomb attack on a football game at a time when there were no football games scheduled. The FBI said it was not going to happen, but Wolfie looked very scared anyway.
On the theory that nothing could be worse than what I had witnessed on MONSTER Super Tuesday , I decided to watch CNN.
4 PM CST: Oh my! There are three women covering the primaries. No snickering guys in suits making rude jokes about Hillary or Bill’s sex life. No “she-devil” comments. No references to “claws” or “pimps”. And no one ever called McCain a “maverick” or a “truth teller” or an ‘independent”. I knew right away that both the Republican Party faithful and Obama supporters who are used to what passes for journalism at MSNBC would probably be horrified by CNN. The Republican Party establishment is so used to seeing their guy verbally serviced by guys like Tweety that the women at CNN must have seemed downright disrespectful to the aging Senator from Arizona in their indifference. And Obama supporters who have come to expect the blatant Hillary and Bill bashing over at MSNBC as their candidate’s due might be tempted to think that the women at CNN are biased in favor of the female candidate because they didn’t make fun of the thickness of her ankles or the lack of money in her coffers or her laugh or her daughter (as the Onion says, “Bullshit is the number one issue on the mind of American voters this campaign season as in every season.”)
5 PM Uh Oh! Lou Dobbs time. We all know he is crazy. Crazy with bigotry over illegal aliens. Maybe I will check in and see what is up at MSNBC. I switch channels and discover that the GE network has no election coverage scheduled tonight. Very odd. Are they embarrassed at being found out as Hillary bashing sexists? Are they expecting their man, McCain to do so poorly tonight that they fear the “mavericks” and “truth tellers” and “independents” will sound hollow falling from their adoring lips?
Back to Lou Dobbs, and his show wasn’t half bad! Sure, he had a rant about immigrants. But he also ranted about the mortgage crisis, and Jesse Jackson got to complain about reverse red lining in which people who should have qualified for normal mortgages were told they could only have the nasty kind—the ones that are costing them their homes. Every one agreed the Bush is to blame and that the next president had better get his act together about the failing economy and that only someone with a plan was going to have a snow ball’s chance in hell of getting elected.
Oooo. Economic issues. And here I thought that Bullshit was the number issue with voters.
6 PM Prime time coverage. Huckabee is projected as the winner of Kansas and no one laughs at either Huckabee or Kansas! Amazing.
645PM Former campaign manager of Fred Thompson is interviewed. He is even more boring than his former candidate. He says that the GOP will eventually get behind McCain, because they will have to, not because they will want to. He does not use the words “maverick”, “truth teller” or “independent”. He sounds very dispirited. The RNC probably does not like this “spin”.
It gets surreal here. They show a video about the “Youth Vote” but the audio does not work, so they get Bill Schneider the oldest person at CNN to talk about the Youth Vote. Apparently young people are all over the map this election, with Huckabee getting his share, too.
Then we get an official statement from the Hillary camp: “Obama is becoming an establishment candidate.” I think this means he has more money than she does.
We get an official statement from the Obama camp: Obama camp says it is all about who gets the most delegates. which does sort of sound like an establishment thing to say (no offense intended. I wonder if they asked him the same question they asked the Hillary people.)
Finally we are told that JFK had a dark side and Reagan was really a liberal so “Get out and vote for the candidates we really have.”
It feels a little bit like a pep rally here. Maybe they were trying to inspire the “Youth Vote” that would not be caught dead sitting at home on Saturday night watching election returns on CNN unless they are already heavily into one of the presidential candidates.
7 PM CNN decides to mix things up. “Huckabee walloped McCain in Kansas.” Them’s fightin’ words.
715 PM Huckabee interview. “People don’t want to be told who their nominee is going to be.” The CNN host half heartedly tries to talk him into dropping out , but he has made up his mind that he is going to campaign all the way up until the convention. Man, he looks so sweet. If I was in trouble, and I had one quarter and the numbers of the four candidates, and I could only call one, I would definitely call Huckabee.
After the interview with Huckabee, there are more results. Obama is going to win everything. Nobody gloats about it or says that Hillary is finished or asks why she doesn’t drop out the way they would on MSNBC. They predict that she will not win anything until Ohio and Texas. They discuss the Republican race. Huckabee has no chance of getting enough delegates for a first ballot win. All he can do is keep McCain from getting a first ballot win and throwing it to a second ballot.
Two points are made that I have been waiting for Tweety (who is supposedly so politically savvy) to make for weeks. 1. Obama’s red state strength may be due to the fact that red states have very liberal Democratic voters, which means that he appeals to the most liberal Democratic voters and not to more middle of the road voters as some people have speculated and 2. Caucuses favor the participation of more affluent people who have the time to take off work or who do not work and who can spend hours participating in a lengthy voting process. Obama tends to attract a more affluent crowd. Hillary’s supporters are more likely to be working class and dependent upon their wages.
This is a whole world above what passes for political discussion on MSNBC where we get to listen to Tweety come up with lame brain theories about how New Hampshire voters favor Hillary by a few points because they are “racist” and Buchanan claim that Hillary has “ghettoized” Obama (whose support among White voters is rising) and Tweety claims that if the New Hampshire vote total does not match the exit polls it means that Hillary voters have hacked the E-vote. And in between attacks on Hillary every other word is maverick.
I guess I will be watching CNN from now on, but I will still watch Countdown. I wonder when KO’s contract is up. He needs to get out of that god awful place—before they conspire to find some reason to destroy his career and get rid of him because he won’t get behind “John McCain, the Maverick for President”.
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