Superficiality vs. Palin
by Adam Pickett (2008.11.02)
The attacks on Sarah Palin have been mostly off-base, exploiting every gaffe, especially
generated gaffes during interviews where she has been generally forced to stick to talking points
from the GOP campaign prep (even if it means answering with points that don’t exist in the
script) - versus little hard coverage of Democratic V.P. candidate Joe Biden (the worst I’ve seen
in their coverage is his miscount of the letters in J-O-B-S). The news media continue to
under-mind what it takes to look good on camera, and are quick to reduce Palin’s credibility at
every turn.
$150,000 is nothing for the $60+ million RNC budget, making her total cost in apparel
less than half a percent of what the GOP is paying for, with no taxpayer money included from what
I’ve found. All of this while Barack Obama’s unprecedented record of over $600 million of campaign
contributions - more than George W. Bush and John Kerry’s raises combined in the 2004 presidential
election - has appeared unabashed.
The coverage of Sarah Palin has gotten rediculous; Michael Palin (same last name, no
relation) has gotten better coverage on qualifications (in amateurish fashion, of course) -- she is
not campaigning for a television show. All of the people I know that have met Palin know that she
is very smart, versus coverage of deliberately trying to make her look like some dumb hick.
“Deliberately sexist,” is the view of The View’s republican co-host, seeing the news
media throwing whatever they can at her, with coverage certainly harsher than that of Democratic
presidential candidate Hillary R. Clinton, months ago. Deliberately racist, I say, given that
Obama has gotten much better coverage because he’s “sensationally” not white -- the media
push double standards, not follow them.
Most of the media coverage has been misleading during workdays, deliberately leaving out
criticism of the downside for certain stories. Fox News, however typically right-leaning, had
40% negative coverage for both McCain and Obama, according to an organization that spends it’s time
counting (you’re only going to get these numbers on Fox News, by the way). Enough of the
time, pundits-turned-hosts on the major news networks sometimes defeat the point they’re trying to
make when presenting the footage they’re using in their criticism: Countdown w/ Keith Olberman took
Rush Limbaugh’s examinations of Barack Obama’s character, in where Obama, in his own words, in an
audio recording from 2001 on a progressive (authoritarian left-wing) radio program, considered the
U.S. constitution out-moded, pulling the obvious context out by reporting on only a short part of
the audio, and filling in context for the entire recording with consideration on the Supreme Court
ruling in the mid-20th century, dealing with a famous - or infamous - segregationist’s case during
the civil-rights movement. Countdown is now spinning the news like never before, where Olberman
would yell at the camera in such a way (with smugness) that would make Joseph McCarthy blush.
Never have I seen such contrast in investigative work, with so much from the Democratic
Party’s ethically-challenged prys into Samuel “Joe” Wurtzelbacher’s health and welfare records, and
yet so little direct investigative work on Barack Obama’s background - despite the fact that
Obama is running for the presidency of the United States. Shawn Hannity has adequately called
the state of the news media in 2008 the “death of journalism.”
Instead of scrutinizing liberal powers, the media have turned anything conservative into
a joke; the longevity of programming on MS-NBC with low ratings easily depend on anti-conservative
positions. The typical mixing of facts with fiction now has lame attempts at comedy included
into the list (one of the few reasons why some of these programs have any ratings at all).
The lack of hard questions and coverage of the Democratic Party, in general, and the
p.r. moves made by many of the major sources reveal a sensational siding with Democrats, to such
that moderates may easily be turned off. Talking heads have become so common-place in cable
news in means of dodging culpability, where talking points seem add almost nothing but
filler. This is dangerous, given the limited amount of time that most viewers have to cover,
and a lack of trust at all corners may promote ignorance.
Bias couldn’t be clearer: 83% of MS-NBC viewers polled during one of the debates said
that they’re “still voting for Obama,” versus the barely-significant lead in the national polls;
the CBS/New York Times poll has consistently led the largest departure of Obama’s lead against
McCain. Who would take a poll with a certain source name, knowing their strong bias? Why
have the formulas changed on what data is used in the results?
With such emptiness and divisiveness in the media landscape, I pose a telling question:
how much of a giant gaping hole in ratings will there be once the election is finally over?
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