This is the kind of moment that the corporate media has been waiting for in order to bury either hers or Obama’s campaign. And they now have something that will be the “defining moment” of the final phase for the campaign. Oh sure, she has been built up time and time again (think New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and whatever else I forgot), only to be gleefully torn apart as she faltered (or was even perceived to falter) by people like Chris Matthews and his talking meatstick counterparts.
It doesn’t matter if she said something that was on her mind that never should have been said.
It doesn’t matter if this was more callous, more calculating or more thoughtless than anything else that she or her surrogates may have said or hinted over the course of the campaign.
It doesn’t matter that Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with cancer this week, or that the comment was about RFK, JFK or MLK.
It doesn’t matter if she was truly trying to invoke history and picked a very poor example.
It doesn’t matter if she admitted that she was very tired and that it was an incredibly stupid or insensitive thing to say.
It doesn’t matter, at this point, if her supporters will be alienated by what she said – especially since most of those supporters have already voted and/or donated to her campaign.
What matters, sadly but true, is that she has now been officially declared “done” with the one moment that can be played over and over and over and over.
And over.
Which goes back to what we talk about here a lot, laziness and stupidity in addition to bias, as a media problem. The utter arbitrariness, in that what one person says passes without comment other than on the back pages of the Beaver County Tidbit (much to the chagrin of the Tidbit) and what someone else says gets blown up into a 24-hour Pig Fuck of a “firestorm,” which incidentally if I never hear that word again … A bunch of things contribute to this: charged environment, relative stupidity of statement, availability of critics and ease of analysis with which to quickly put together a Sunday show, the latter being so much more crucial than people think. If you can’t get anyone on the phone to say “that was outrageous!” you can’t write a story about outrage.
I’m not defending her at all, at best it was a fucking dumbass thing to say and very uncool, at best. But the total lack of rules to this thing, the lack of dare I say it, standards to which journalists are always declaring they adhere, makes fighting back against it very difficult, and that’s a lesson that all Democrats should have learned four years ago, hell, eight years ago. It’s a lesson they’re going to need to learn damn quick in the coming months.
A.
You’re gonna hear that sound byte played in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and California and Texas and New York, South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and Washington, D.C., Yeeeeeargh!
I thought, up until now, that I would just avoid certain places in the media/internets until this primary was over. Then I could go back and we could make up and all be friends again. Now – not so much. I don’t know if I can ever watch KO again after this. He hates her so hard, and with such glee. He’s determined to MAKE her drop out. When did that become his job?
I’ve followed Keith across the media since his days on Sportcenter. I even watched him on Sunday night on Fox Sports – and I hate Fox Sports. But this quest of his is making me sick. For someone who touts his journalistic integrity, he really seems to have lost his way.
I feel the same way about the rest of those Bozos on MSGOP. And I haven’t watched CNN since they hired Mrs Dan Senor.
(Feel free to add the usual disclaimer about how embarrassing HRC’s campaign has become here.)
i never watched teevee gnews. they are for disaster footage only. natural jazz hands.
Congratulations, you sexist media crotchwallopers, on upping the bullying level even further. The first successful female candidate for US President, and you’re going to chivvy her out of the race in favour of the man, and then claim it was her fault all along, which is, of course, rapist’s logic.
(For what it’s worth, I read thewhole transcript of what she said, and it’s pretty obvious she meant “…and Bobby Kennedy was still campaigning in June too, when he was assasinated,” although she really didn’t phrase it very well. Shee-zuz.)
24 hour Pig Fuck… I like that.
I was watching Frontline talk about marketing and I too see this stupid stuff happen and I want to help make it stop.
To make it stop would take education of journalists, but they don’t really WANT to be educated. “Who the hell are YOU to tell ME what is news? Don’t tell ME how to do MY job you silly bloggers!”
It will take the education of consumers of news and some of that is going on.
We are seeing some exposés on this stuff, in the blogs, PBS and people like the Center for Media and Democracy have been doing this for years.
But I know that the people who are feeding this stuff to the media will just keep doing it FOREVER because the media just eat it up.
I think we need to actually expose the feeders so that they can’t do this crap all the time. But they won’t ever be exposed if there aren’t consequences for the feeders or the people who live off the feeders. Maybe some slander or libel lawsuits would be useful. Why that route? Because that is the only language they they understand. If they know that defaming someone will cost them money, well then they might think twice. If there are no guidelines or ethics and they have no consequences they have nothing to stop them for defaming people.
And are we really LOSING anything if people have an incentive to NOT spread rumors? To NOT spread lies?
The other way they always say is that if you want to battle speech you don’t like is to have more speech. Well that would be swell if they didn’t have a monopoly on some of the channels of distribution. If they didn’t control what gets out via the bar of expensive ads or shows where the producers have to ASK someone to come on the show. The Producers control the experts who show up. They aren’t going to invite someone on to tell the world, “Hey this show used a bunch of paid off Generals to sell the war.”
I know that we THINK that journalists would have to do a story about the behind the scenes manipulators but they won’t because they use them all the time. They don’t want to admit that they can be manipulated.
They LOVE Matt Drudge. They Like to listen to Rush for “entertainment”. They ALLOW Rush and Drudge to get away with throwing stuff out that that is unsourced and juicy so that THEY can use it. THEY would never go after Drudge or Rush or hold them to any kind of standards because then they couldn’t USE those juicy stories.
What’s that line?, “If Rush and Drudge didn’t exist they would have to be created.”
Oppo people give info to the feeders. The Feeders make it catchy, and feed it up stream. As long as it is interesting nobody stops to question it.
For the best most current example look at the “independent generals” on the Pentagon gravy train via their subcontractor employers.
Part of the game is both exposing their narrative as bogus and then giving them another one. It’s not just good enough to expose the other one because then they will have to cast around for a NEW one.
It’s not surprising that nobody in the cable TV did a story about their use of generals who were on “the take”. They were compromised and they don’t want to do a story about them being suckered. “Hey America, we fed you stories from this General who wasn’t really independent. Our bad.”
So one thing will be to go the the stations and say, “When the next war related deal comes up, who you going to call?”
watching the truman thing on PBS tonight. i think fondly of the smoke filled rooms. they gave us FDR and truman.
spocko – there are about 6 companies left who ‘feed’ us the news. When I was growing up, three decades ago, that number was at least 40.
That’s the root. That’s my first change to make.
It wasn’t the last thing to be bandied about the “news” channels that has put me off of her…HRC has been “done” in my book for sometime now…from the moment months back when I caught a whiff of the foetid stench of “you have to pick me, I am Hillary! Noone else matters – give it to me, put it on a silver salver dammit – NOW!!!” from her camp. Everything else since then has been so much rotted garnish on the plate of steaming crap.
Thanks, buhbye.
Elspeth