It's hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, "a shameful night for the U.S. media." It's hard because -- like many other Americans -- I am still angry at what I just witnessed, so angry that it's hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that "media criticism" -- especially when it's one journalist speaking to another -- tends to be a genteel, collegial thing, but there's no genteel way to say this.
With your performance tonight -- your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane "issue" questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters -- you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it's even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to "export democracy," and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, "no thank you." Because that was no way to promote democracy.
Read the rest here.
1 comment:
Kelly, please don't take any of this the wrong way. If it sounds harsh, it's only because I'm not setting it down and coming back to edit it later.
I liked the debate or at least the snippets I saw afterwards and what I read of it. I learned quite a bit from it.
Barack Obama is into moral equivalence, big time. If it's not his grandmother being compared to a racist lunatic, it's a Senator being compared to an unrepentant terrorist. I don't think the questions went far enough on this line. Barack was in the mob lynching Don Imus. That would have been a tough one to explain after defending Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright.
The capital gains tax question may have been the single greatest MSM debate question ever. They have never asked questions like that. I was stunned. You should read what the right wing blogs are saying. It's like they think they're on another planet. It's wonderful.
As for the questions being insubstantial, welcome to our world. Remember the Confederate flag questions or the Jesus questions in the Republican debates? That happens to us all the time.
Conservatives make up half of this country and up to now, we've been woefully under-represented in the media. For us, debates hosted by the MSM have always been like this one. I think ABC is trying to stake out its ground in the middle and did a good job on here.
The rise of the new media, both in talk radio and the blogs, along with the collapse of the MSM is going to lead to more balanced debates. I don't think your side is used to this kind of questioning. We are. Get used to it. This is just the beginning. The days of a nearly universally friendly media may be coming to a close for the Democrats.
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