Post-mortems of contemporary election coverage typically include regrets about horserace journalism, he-said-she-said stenography, and the lack of enlightening stories about the issues.
But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.
Ornstein said the media's failure led him to conclude: "If you want to use a strategy of 'I'm just going to lie all the time', when you have the false equivalence meme adopted by a mainstream press and the other side lies a quarter of the time, you get away with it."
Yep, the Magical Balance Fairy got one hell of a workout during this election, didn't she?
I wonder if the "media" being mostly, in this country, comprised of private enterprises who exist to make a profit, would actually bite the hand that feeds them?
No, they won't.
Thus the last thing they'll do is to try and stop the flow of billions of dollars from wingnut buyers of air time.
When you have a press that his been bullied and brow beaten into submission by an army of fanatics looking not for truth or fact of any kind, but simply more ideological absolution from said press over the last thirty years. To where even the hint of an opinion from an angle other than the standard right wing mind fuck at the moment means another round of brow beating and bullying, what the hell do you expect?
You get cravenness and Broderism.
Both sides do it repeated ad nauseum until it becomes common perception, and we all know that perception to most people(especially those who are just too intellectually shallow to give a shit about anything other than what they are going to eat for lunch or watch on television when they get home from work on any given day) is reality.
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More: Has the Oklahoma Atheist Been Saved? Belief Blog Blogs Stand by. The Religious right assholes are either going to go apeshit about this or try to bury it. Please, feel free to tweet/retweet it to Bryan et al. (CNN) - Just days after she announced to the world from tornado-ravaged Moore, Oklahoma, that she is an atheist, it looks like Rebecca Vitsmun has ...
So all those crazy things he said can just be disregarded As Democrats and the media continue to hammer Virginia lieutenant governor hopeful E.W. Jackson for his past comments on social issues, the Christian minister says he is battling what he calls the “mainstream media’s caricature” of him. In an email sent to The Daily Caller this week, the running mate to Republican gubernatorial ...
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6) If husbands want more sex, women should do everything they can to give it to them. Focus on the Family's marriage counselor Juli Slattery is blunt about: Married men need sex, and so wives who aren't providing enough need to step up. While she claims she isn't trying to guilt trip women into having more sex, she argues that sex is a ...
If you need further proof that Congressional Republicans are waging a War on Women, you need look no further than Thursday's congressional committee hearing on H.R. 1797: District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a bill sponsored by notoriously anti-choice Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ8) that would criminalize abortions after the 20th week. There are currently 98 women serving in the House of ...
The spoiler version is that out in California, where the state government and advocacy groups are actually interested in doing Obamacare right, things are looking pretty good. They're standing up their exchanges and it turns out premiums for basic bronze and more comprehensive silver health plans will actually come in lower than anticipated. This is almost unambiguously good news for Obamacare. You can ...
Last month we shared some photo illustrations by science artist Ron Miller that showed what the night sky would look like if other planets in our solar system replaced the moon. Now Miller is back again with an equally interesting concept: what would landscape photos look like if Earth had a ring like Saturn's? It's nice having a moon, but "for spectacular skies ...
Bioresorbable splint used for first time, successfully stopped life-threatening tracheobronchomalacia, case featured in New England Journal of Medicine Ann Arbor, Mich. - Every day, their baby stopped breathing, his collapsed bronchus blocking the crucial flow of air to his lungs. April and Bryan Gionfriddo watched helplessly, just praying that somehow the dire predictions weren't true. "Quite a few doctors said he had a ...
Spacecraft could determine their position anywhere in the solar system to within five kilometres using signals from x-ray pulsars, say astronomers. Navigating in space is a tricky business. The usual method relies on Earth-based tracking stations to work out a spacecraft's distance using radio waves, a process that is accurate to within a metre or so. That's fine for the radial distance, but ...
The NASA Astrobiology Program has started the process of outlining future research directions at the organization. Roughly every ten years, the program updates NASA’s official Astrobiology Roadmap – a document that guides research and technology develop ment across NASA and encompass the space, Earth, and biological sciences. This time around, the program is opening the process up to the wider astrobiology community and ...
"Crisis Pregnancy Centers" (CPCs) or Pregnancy Resource Centers advertise on your campus and in your community. They pose as comprehensive women's health clinics and advertise under "abortion" and "family planning" services, but do not offer abortion services, contraception, or referrals. CPCs often provide false information about abortion, birth control, and the effectiveness of condoms for the prevention of STIs and HIV. Ultimately, their ...
Matthew Lang at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, says the danger arises when the rifle falls into the hands of those who are neither hunters nor military snipers. "If it starts to find its way to individuals that plan to use it for other purposes, there will be a lot of time and money spent figuring out how to secure any public area ...
Nice, right? Anyway, here's my thesis: Raiders of the Lost Ark is not an action-adventure movie about an archaeologist who plays by his own rules and saves the day. Instead, the film is an exploration of Marion Ravenwood's crippling drug addiction. An addiction that was born from her unhealthy relationship and continued association with Indiana Jones. Is it true? Who cares. Can I prove ...
As shocking and appalling as Wednesdays brutal murder was, Woolwich (wool-ich) is a not so surprising location for such an attack. As someone pretty local to Woolwich, I thought I might give a little profile of the area, if anyone is interested. Woolwich is traditionally a military area, with the old Arsenal at its centre and the new barracks one of London's important military ...
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) brushed away a question about Latinos working in his administration during a roundtable discussion at The Union League in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Friday, telling the moderator, "If you can find us one let me know": MODERATOR: Do you have staff members that are Latino? CORBETT: No, we do not have any staff members in there. If you can ...
More: $40 for Case of Bottled Water? 'Preying' on Oklahoma Tornado Victims Investigators with the Oklahoma Attorney General's office have already uncovered evidence of businesses taking advantage of the recent tornado's devastation by price-gouging in the weather-ravaged region, including a grocery store accused of charging consumers $40 for a case of water. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt told ABC News that 30 investigators from ...
there's no such thing as Flickr Pro, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing really as professional photographers, when there's everything is professional photographers. Certainly there is varying levels of skills, but we didn't want to have a Flickr Pro anymore, we wanted everyone to have professional quality photos, space, and sharing." - Marissa Mayer, Yahoo ...
It has long been part of the Washington game for officials to discredit a news story by playing up errors in a relatively small part of it. Pfeiffer gives the impression that GOP operatives deliberately tried to "smear the president" with false, doctored e-mails. But the reporters involved have indicated they were told by their sources that these were summaries, taken from notes ...
Throwing objects such as this are capable of damaging expensive musical equipment and musicians. Any more of this and there will be no more music. -- FZ, Autumn 1981 at Northrup auditorium in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After someone threw a plunger on stage about two-thirds of the way through the show, he stopped the band with a wave of his hand speaking in the general direction that the dangerous object was thrown, while holding it in his hand. This did not prove to be an amusing act and Franks mood hardened. - It was, however, an evening of excellent, serious musicianship around the release of 'Shut up and play your guitar'
Frank says: