This'll be long
What. The. F*CK?
I get that traditional print media is dead or dying. I get that we're somehow expected to pay $500 for an e-reader and another $100 a year or so for subscriptions to "quality" journalism. And I get that the "free" online model is driven by CPMs, clickthrough, and a whole host of metrics that I'll never understand but that ultimately mean I have to wade through a clunky, barely functional, ad-laden crapfest to get to even a nugget of sensible reporting.
But does that also mean I have to be treated to this?:
No I get it, really I do.
Obama is a big fat liar. A huge disappointment. A paid shill for Jamie Dimond, and all the other fat cats. If only McCain/Palin were in office so we wouldn't have to hear our administration cheering for free markets and CEO compensation (we could just read it on their hands instead).
And I get that taking a few sentences out of context from an as yet unpublished article can drive some of this clickthrough stuff, especially from the redstate pajama crowd, but is this really the answer to Journalism's woes? Is this really why Ariana left the right wing (loved her in "the Siege", btw) to champion liberal causes and bring integrity back to journalism after its miserable failure in the pre-Iraq days?
Let me put my feelings in simple bullet points for you Arianna:
- nearly half of our elected representatives are children. Moronic, spoiled, bought-and-paid-for, children, hell bent on paralyzing our government until they get the white house back. The other half is not a whole lot better, but they're better.
- The last president and vice president were morally bankrupt and were hell bent on waging war to prop up war industries, perpetuate our relationship with oil, and satisfy the xenophobic bloodlust of their base. Even if this president is truly capitulating to greedy bankers, there's no moral equivalency here. One is not as bad as the other. One is a sick, dangerous ideology that needs to be exorcised from our national discourse, while the other is a questionable set of priorities that needs to be challenged and debated in rational terms. For someone who is always calling out the media for false equivalencies, it's ironic how you seem to have created one by implication.
- Censoring comments that question the journalistic merits of an article, while simultaneously opening the floodgates to comments that slam the president with nothing but vapid right-wing slogans, is not only unfair, it's hypocritical. You slam Obama for his "bipartisanship", yet your comment approval model is clearly designed to satiate right wing critics at the expense of reasoned discourse.
Now I credit places like Huffpo with shifting our national dialog a bit to the left and enabling us to recapture the white house and congress, but if it's to live up to its mission it needs to do more. It needs to shift the dialog from gut-based fearmongering and sensationalism toward reason and progress.
Carry on....