The Anything But Courageous Debate

I missed the debate Wednesday night. I'm very happy about that, because my TV still works, and I cannot guarantee it would not have had a large hole in it afterward. So, I wake up the next day to check the politics reddit, just to see what some people are saying, and all of the top ten (12 of the top 15) links were separate complaints about the debate. It was shocking how unified everyone was writing about the horrible lack of substance and stampede of right-wing attack that passed for a debate on ABC. Glenn Greenwald bats leadoff here, as always in dealing with media nonsense:

My favorite (unintentionally revealing) media commentary about the debate is from The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut and Dan Balz, who devoted paragraph after paragraph to describing the substance-free "issues" that consumed most of the debate -- Obama's "remarks about small-town values, questions about his patriotism and the incendiary sermons of his former pastor . . . gaffes, missteps and past statements" -- and, at the end of the article, they added:

The debate also touched on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, taxes, the economy, guns and affirmative action.

It's just not possible to express the wretched state of our establishment press better than that sentence does.

And over at Kos, Hunter presents the idea that this sham of a debate was just as historic as Obama's speech on race, but in a much more sinister sense:

What a contrast. Only a few weeks ago, we were presented with what was considered by many to be a historic speech by a presidential candidate on race in America -- historic for its substance, tone, delivery, and stark candor. Last night, we had an opposing, equally historic example -- and I sincerely mean that, I consider it to be every bit as significant as that word implies -- of the collapse of the political press into self-willed incompetence. You might as well pull any half-intelligent person off the street, and they would unquestionably have more difficult and significant questions for the two candidates. It was not merely a momentarily bad performance, by ABC, it was a debate explicitly designed to be what it was, which is far more telling.

Read the whole thing. I'm tempted to agree. There was such outrage than even Howie Kurtz, media critic extraordinaire, decried it, not just the lefty blogs. Maybe this embarrassment to the profession will be a wake-up call to the traditional media. Maybe they'll start to realize people care, and we can begin the healing process. The cynic is me still doubts.

And for a bigger sampling of the outrage, here's a summary from AMERICABlog.

Musical Mario Car

One of the coolest things I've seen in a while.


http://view.break.com/487616 - Watch more free videos

Man, it takes me a day just to figure this out on piano. Can't imagine the effort that went into this.

Media hatred isn't new.

This is a really interesting post.

But the right wing talk brigade doesn't exist just to build up their own or tear down Democrats. They have, from the moment they first rolled onto the air, existed to tell you that traditional news organizations are no good. The Washington Post? Inside the beltway losers out of touch with real America. CNN? The Clinton News Network. The New York Times? Please. Do you really have to ask?

Punditry has always aimed as much artillery at the people who deliver the news as it does at those who make it. There's a very good reason for this. Before you can convince someone of a lie, you need to make it more difficult for them to check your information. If you establish from the start that NPR is communist, MSNBC and CNN are slanted, and every newspaper this side of Journal's editorial page should be printed on pink paper, then any exaggeration you deliver becomes the de facto standard. Impugning the validity of other news sources is the first job of a successful pundit. They don't seek to be your sources of information by passing along reliable news. They do so by constantly assailing the legitimacy of other sources until you're left shaking your head at the absolute ignorance of everyone but Rush/Bill/Sean/Ann.

...

The myth of the "liberal media" came long before the blogs. Discrediting the "nattering nabobs" of the press is not a game that originated with bloggers. Every blogger I know is fully aware that we could not survive without the legwork done by hardworking, professional reporters. Bloggers are not competition to the traditional media -- though they do, hopefully, act as an occasional check on its excesses. However, even if the Internet were entirely dedicated to the downfall of existing media, it would be only one popgun in a chorus of cannons. A large part of the traditional media is dedicated to nothing less than making war on the rest.

Suffering the wounds from that war, the media might have chosen to hold to strict standards and fought back by dissecting the falsehoods being directed against good reporting. Instead, that job has been left, almost without exception, to the very bloggers Keen blames as the cause. The reaction of the traditional media was quite different.

In response to the assault from less factual sources, media both accelerated the already existing trend toward mingling news and entertainment and -- in the most twisted move imaginable -- sought to imitate the mudslingers. They joined the war not by upholding their standards, but by dismissing them. And again, they did so for the reason that Keen indicates as the break between amateur and professional: the perception that there was more money to be made on the less truthful side of the aisle.

It's a good point, I think, that blogs are not new in that regard. But how do we reestablish that facts are indeed important and reshape the news? Glenn Greenwald, in this interview, suggests mudslinging MAD:

The point isn't to start lowering oneself to that level and copying the worst parts of the Right's behavior. The point is to neutralize what they do so that it's no longer one-sided. If one country possesses nuclear weapons, a rival country wants to obtain them not to use them, but to render their use irrational, impossible. That's what Democrats and liberals must start doing with these election rituals.

Maybe that's the answer. But, as they suggest about Iran, I'm not sure the Right is rational enough for MAD to work as a deterrent. We probably need regulation of what qualifies as press, as I've suggested in the past (last few paragraphs, post-rant).