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November 12, 2007

"Committing News"

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

In light of the latest round of bashing Russertism—loosely, the fact that the press expends a good chunk of its face time with candidates hectoring them with criticism of inconsistency, imperfection, or attempts to goad them into starting intra-party squabbles or speaking politically inconvenient truths like "we must raise taxes to close the deficit, unless we want to eliminate all student loans and disband The Marines", without giving any sense of the relative importance of various issues—and Ben Smith's summary of Obama's Meet The Press appearance: "Obama won [his appearance on Meet The Press] by not losing, and didn't commit any news", now is as good a time as any to remind everyone of Why Americans Hate The Media. As James Fallows points out, much of the media-crit story transcends time and place, which makes it very hard to come up with good ways to eliminate the disconnect between political journalism and the self-reported news interests of Real America.

—Signed, not Ezra Klein

November 12, 2007 | Permalink

Comments

Thx for the the link to the "hate the media" story by Fallows, Nicholas, it was very revealing. When even the better guys like Jennings are so unstable in their view on journalistic ethics, there's abolutely no low we can't expect from the worst members of that profession. That's appalling.

And now to something totally different: How do those effing chinese spammers get their lame ads posted here? I thought there's a spam filter triggered every time even a single link is posted, to prevent exactly this kind of shit? Pls delete this crap asap!

Posted by: Gray | Nov 12, 2007 5:43:36 AM

Hello, admins, after you had your morning coffee it would really be nice if you turn on the effing spam filter and delete all those spams by Judy. These are really screwing the threads up. Thank you very much.
|-(

Posted by: Gray | Nov 12, 2007 7:14:38 AM

I'd recommend shunning the mainstream media, especially TV, but besides other reasons, I assume Ezra likes the exposure and pocket change...umm, I at least hope he makes a couple bucks off Hardball.

If I could conceivably get on Matthews, which is not conceivable, I would immediately go into a screaming rant, not stopping until they carried me off the set. I know there would be some that think a calm Stewart snark would be more effective, but that hasn't worked yet.

In addition, I would like to point out that the audiences for the scum shows are nationally tiny, and their importance is related to the arrogant elitism of the Village. If we can make politics and policy outside the Beltway, meatspace & virtual, decisive, force Feinstein to be more concerned with Sacramento than Russert, things might change. Good luck.

Posted by: bob mcmanus | Nov 12, 2007 8:57:35 AM

Wow,the spams are gone! Thx folks!!!

Hmm, I don't want to discourage you, but there's still lots of them in comments of arichived threads, I noticed just recently (no misunderstanding: NEW spam in OLD threads). You might want to close 'old' threads and write a script to get rid of all those linklists...
:-/

Posted by: Gray | Nov 12, 2007 9:57:30 AM

Not Cheney. "Advatage [with Russert]: We control the message."

Posted by: Gore/Edwards 08 | Nov 12, 2007 10:04:04 AM

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