Some conservatives like to whine about how 'liberal' the news media is. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Such complaining has always seemed more a tactic than a real belief. A tactic designed to bully the media into being more conservative in order to appease them. Unfortunately, liberals, seeing the success of the conservative intimidation campaign, started adopting the same tactics a few years ago. This all misses the point.
In my opinion, the news media isn't liberal (or conservative). It's corporate, which means its objective is to maximize profit and it does so by minimizing risk. Minimizing risk like being so neutral and milquetoast and superficial. This is done because when you do real reporting, you're likely piss someone off. If the media really were overwhelmingly liberal, it would go out of business because a generally centrist country wouldn't have enough demand to support an overwhelmingly liberal news media.
It's this superficiality that leads the media to focus on trivialities like lipstick and other forms of makeup and on the 'horse race' aspect of the irrelevant polls (ie: all of them except the one conducted on Nov. 4) instead of covering, for example, the real issues raised by the so-called 'third party' candidates who provide the real alternatives in this election.
A great example of this superficiality can be seen in the breaking news alerts for ABC News and CNN to which I subscribe. I've lost track of how many I've received with garbage about OJ Simpson or drunk driving Hollywood actors or an update on the latest 'missing random, photogenic, upper middle class white girl of the week' saga.
Take this one I just received a few minutes ago:
Elisabeth Hasselbeck of 'The View' Invited by Sarah Palin to Appear at Two Weekend Rallies
Does ABC really need to clutter my inbox with this crap?
I subscribe to the NEWS alerts of these channels. For the three people who actually care who Elisabeth Hasselbeck or any other celebrity is campaigning for, put it on the Entertainment alerts!
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