Paul Waldman on Media Matters writes a devastating critique that puts the blame on the toxic state of politics right where it belongs: on the media.
"It is some kind of commentary on the state of American politics that as Edwards has campaigned for president, vice president and now president again, his hair seems to have attracted as much attention as, say, his position on health care.
...No, this lament came from The Washington Post's John Solomon in the midst of a 1,288-word article about -- you guessed it -- John Edwards' hair. It's some kind of commentary, all right -- but not on the state of American politics; it's a commentary on the state of American journalism.
When the mainstream media isn’t obsessed with a local news story somewhere in the country, or not reporting on major events around the world, it’s because the mainstream reporters are busy digging deep into the heart of policy matters, and of course, John Edward’s haircut.
But let's give credit where it's due. Solomon didn't just write one more derivative article on The Haircut. He employed all his skills as an "investigative reporter," snagging an exclusive interview with the guy who cut Edwards' hair. He delved deep, plumbing the depths of the stylist's feelings about Edwards, and meticulously cataloguing the price of each haircut administered. It is fair to say that no reporter has gone further, or revealed more about the moment when scissors met locks and what it all meant.
Alert the Pulitzer committee.
You bet, and no matter what slurs and misdirects you can throw at someone’s campaign, an exhausted and time crunched public can barely record the number of times your accusations amounted to nothing.
No apologies needed in today’s rich American media environment. Where what you don’t know won’t hurt you and your suffering is our higher ratings.
You don't have to be a professor of semiotics to understand what The Haircut is supposed to represent. It was seized upon with such glee by the press corps because it brings together two key stories that its members never tire of telling about Democrats. ...
The first story is this: Democrats are phony. They pretend they're regular people when they're really not, reporters tell us. They pretend they care about poor people, when they couldn't possibly, if they themselves are not poor. (The Republican presidential candidates, on the other hand, are rich and evince no particular interest in helping people who aren't, which seems to be what the press considers the appropriate stance to adopt.)
John Edwards is certainly rich. How rich? So rich that when he gets a haircut, he doesn't care what it costs. And not only that, he has a big house. As a point of comparison, Mitt Romney is much richer than John Edwards. I have no idea how big his houses are (he has at least three -- one in Massachusetts, one in New Hampshire, and one in Utah -- to Edwards' one), and neither does anyone else, because reporters haven't been interested enough to write stories about them.
But in the eyes of the press, if a rich guy spends a lot of time talking about ways to end poverty, he must be a "hypocrite," as though he were actually advocating not that poverty should be eradicated, but that everyone should be poor.
So it’s OK to be a rich Republican who has expensive haircuts, just because of your Republicanosity, that makes you more of a regular working class Joe. Despite the fact that your party’s economic policies are impoverishing the Bush Country denizens, Republicans own the manly regular guy meme; and in the meantime, the press is actually crafting this and selling it in lieu of news.
You can go to the Al Jazeera English webpage and get more news that’s actually relevant to you than you can on ABC.
Bush was real.
And wouldn't you know it? The Republicans running this year are real, too.
John McCain? Newsweek tells us that if he seems blue on the campaign trail, "[i]t may be because at heart, he is not a politician. He is a warrior," while his every utterance is lauded as "straight talk."
Rudy Giuliani? He's "the one tough cop who was standing on the beat when we got hit last time and stood up and took it," someone who has "street cred" when it comes to "protect[ing] this country against the bad guys," says Chris Matthews.
Fred Thompson? He's "the pickup-driving former senator and 'Law & Order' star," says The Washington Post -- never mind that the truck was a campaign prop.
So Republicans are manly and Democrats are effeminate and let’s talk about that instead of policy difference. And this is by the way, I would love to beat Chris Matthews with a baseball bat for about ten minutes.
"Can you smell the English Leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man's shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved?" asked Chris Matthews about Fred Thompson. "Do you smell that sort of -- a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever."
The problem is that the news media has the same name they have had forever, but their roles have finally shifted. Today’s news media could give a shit about the actual facts, or the effects of what they report of don’t. Today’s media is about money and redearship or circulation to the deriment of every thing else.
The media stopped being a watchdog a long time ago and I fear it will never be that again or us, ever.
But there is no assignment editor in the sky. Stories don't just "happen"; they are the product of choices made by journalists. When a campaign comes to a reporter with a juicy piece of opposition research, the journalist makes a decision to write about it, or not. When a flack makes a vicious attack on his candidate's opponent, reporters choose to repeat it. John Solomon chose to write about John Edwards' hair, and not his health care plan. There's nothing stopping them from writing about issues, or even writing about the day-to-day progression of the campaign in a way that doesn't turn them into handmaidens of one side's crusade of defamation and distraction. Journalists have to make decisions every day. Is it too much to ask that they make the right ones?
The media created the messages and the circus like atmosphere of the last two elections and they were more obsessed with the gossip and slander fed to them than they were reporting the facts of the case.
I remember at the Democatic National Convention when Sharpton was delivering a killer speech and MSNBC cut away to Howard Fineman remarking about Tawana Brawley.
That's our media folks.
When I grew up the media reported the news. Today they are the news. That’s the problem. They cavort with the people they are supposed to be covering, they surrender integrity for access and all settle for fame and fortune. It’s sad when someone like David Gregory can’t understand what a fuck up it was for him to dance with Karl Rove. It just shows me that neither he, nor the millionaire Congressmen and Senators, nor the millionaire inside the beltway life-term pundits have any idea what life is like here in America.
Fuck every last one of them.
http://mediamatters.org/...