Posted by
Bill Crawford on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 11:38:17 PM
Well, that one was a great debate in hyperdrive. It takes your breath away to realize how fast things can happen in the brave new (interconnected) world. The prognosis of Congressman Gifford looks up with every day that passes, more decent people formed a wall between the poor Green girl's funeral and the morons of the Westboro Church. The dead and injured remain, but there are good things to be found in tragedy sometimes.
One of them is that, despite the behavior of the media, the political class maintained a quiet human dignity, from top to bottom. When you work in Congress, the person across the aisle is a face and a personality. Some of them still set everyone's teeth on edge (like Grayson from Florida), but Gifford was by all accounts a genuine nice person and a class act, and you could tell it really was cutting members of both parties to pieces when the news came.
As far as the media goes, a job had to be done. What was said and written set me the hell off, and I obviously wasn't alone. I wasn't about to be defined like that by letting this bulls**t go unanswered, and there was a reaction- a pretty fierce one, too. It did it's job, I doubt many outside the coastal regions of America will walk away with the cause and effect being presented as the new conventional wisdom.
There was a new lesson for me, though. I thought the mainstream media could not get any lower than they did during the 2008 campaign, and I was wrong.
It's not the MSNBC types that disappoint. Hell, they have the ratings and advertising rates of a 600 watt AM station, so Maddow and Olberman can afford to be what they are. In the world of the small, you can talk like an idiot, and there is little consequence.
The NY Times is my heartbreaker. I grew up on that paper. It was the origin of many TV news stories then, too (although for more constructive reasons) and I regarded it as a worthy news reference to bounce other sources off of.
That pretty much died by 1995. Their editorial standards seeped into their news content, and when the budget cuts came later it got even worse. Now you can't even potty train dogs with it- it won't absorb any more.
The new hope for is all is Paul Krugman. The stuff that drolled off his pen this weekend was beyond the pale. He gives hope to all of us. Even an average joe with the critical thinking skills of a urinal mint can win a Nobel Prize now. Thanks for that, at least.