Ah, presidential debates. What a great social indicator for the political culture of our time. While I don’t want to take sides here, nor really do I care to get down and dirty (for it is dirty) and wade through the varied and banal ads, spin, blathering, condescending posturing, rhetoric, counter-rhetoric, meta-rhetoric, and who knows what else kind of rhetoric, I can take a politically neutral stance and point out that this Frank Rich op-ed piece has some interesting comments about the recent debate on ABC.
Most students of Columbia probably don’t need this blog to learn about Frank Rich, he’s popular and reliable. The reason I link to it here is because it’d be easy to pretend that the media doesn’t play favorites, and that the media doesn’t get submerged in the harmful political discourse it pretentiously and complacently believes to hold accountable. When the L.A. Times somehow intimates that Edward Said, a scholar of near-Olympian proportion especially at Columbia, is, to put it mildly, shady—and Obama’s in the story, so ohhh!—I don’t have a politically oriented reaction so much as just feel embarrassed for the journalism industry I wish to enter post-grad. (for stronger language re: the hackery, see our friends at Commentariat)
As Rich writes, you can remain politically neutral and still agree with the “viewers of all political persuasions [who] were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we’re losing in Afghanistan. Those minutes were devoted not just to recycling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bosnian sniper fire and another lame question about a possible “dream ticket” but to the unseemly number of intrusive commercials and network promos that prompted the jeering at the end.”
This is nothing new, or original (perhaps some will find it interesting that the editor of an Ivy newspaper can be something other than naively idealistic about journalism…naive and idealistic, maybe?) but the least I can do is post that I’m “mad” and wish I could “not take it anymore.”
“But that remains on hold while we resolve whether Mr. Obama lost Wednesday’s debate with his defensive stumbling, or whether Mrs. Clinton lost it with her ceaseless parroting of right-wing attacks. The unequivocally good news is that ABC’s debacle had the largest audience of any debate in this campaign. That’s a lot of viewers who are now mad as hell and won’t take it anymore.”
Hell, I hope he’s right.
