Five Before Chaos

..or something similar. The Dem campaign has been increasingly painful for me as of late. This country is more screwed up with some serious problems than I can ever remember in my 37 years of existence and the most important issue of the day facing Americans is what Obama’s preacher said. I’m finding myself screaming at my computer monitor more and more lately. It’s unreal how unbelievably fucked up the media has become in the last decade, and even more is how much damage it’s enabled to happen to our country and the world at large.

I had mixed feelings about the Obama-going-on-Fox thing. This was compounded by the fact that I discovered last week that one of the people I’ve worked with for over 10 years, a regular Fox-watcher actually believes that “al-Qaeda has gotten to Obama. He’s in with them.”

Silly me for thinking these kinds of people only lurked in the right-wingnutosphere of blogland. When she said this, I could only respond, “I’m sorry.” My point is that the majority of Fox-watchers already have their minds made up, irregardless of “facts”, which more often than not, they can’t seem to bother themselves with anyways. So, I didn’t see real net advantage to Obama going on there.

It was this context that apparently prompted an exceptional diary over at Open Left today that examined the radical change in the media now that the well-oiled right wing infrastructure is in place. Now, you really need to go read the article, called “The Impact of Presidential Candidates On the Media OR What Obama Should Have Done on Fox News”, but have a look here at the example he gives… Dan Rather’s grilling of then-candidate George H.W. Bush about his bullshitting on his role in Iran-Contra. The first segment offers some background, and the second is the interview. Rather tears Bush a new asshole and doesn’t let him control the agenda:

As the diary points out succinctly. can you even imagine a journalist questioning someone in position of power like that, unless it came from the right-wing spin angle? It shocked the hell out of me, lemme tell ya. And I don’t think we’ll ever see something like this again, as the ‘journalists’ are more concerned about Laura Bush cooking on the Today show or some teen flavor-of-the-month feeling guilty for showing a bare shoulder on a photo-shoot. Oh, and flag pins. Gotta have flag pins, very important.

Can you imagine a reporter questioning Bush or McCain like this and not letting them off the hook? Neither can I. The ones that would, like Amy Goodman and such don’t have the access or the platform to make it happen.

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