GOP Hypocrite of the Week: TV News Media
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Listen to the GOPHOTW HERE
Welcome back to the BuzzFlash.com GOP Hypocrite of the Week.
It's now official. What we all suspected has become crystal clear: the mainstream news media is a big time enabler to the vast right wing conspiracy.
The decision by the mainstream networks to barely give coverage to the Democratic National Convention enables the Republicans to continue to define Kerry and the Democrats in the absence of network exposure to an alternative perspective. An impassioned, positive, inclusionary vision was articulated over four nights, yet Dan Rather says he'd get better ratings airing a "test pattern." Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings are all in agreement: there's no news to be had at the Dem Convention.
Ya
know, perhaps Dan Rather should be replaced by a test pattern,
it sure would be cheaper than that bunch of tired, old, superannuated
corporate shills! Rather, Brokaw, Jennings and their ilk know
that Viacom, GE and Disney sign the paychecks for their big
fat multi-million dollar salaries. They know that by restricting
the public's exposure to the Democrats most articulate convention
in years, they will be able to continue to report GOP "manufactured
news" about flip-flopping candidates and opinionated women.
It is simply beyond disgusting.
And while the all-news cable networks decided to spend more time "covering" the convention, most of it was spent trashing the Dems, repeating Republican soundbites, and talking over the speeches with fatuous, biased punditry. Who has time to discuss the Democrats' new policy ideas or how they plan to move the nation forward when their five minutes on CNN is spent rebutting GOP-sponsored lies and talking points dutifully regurgitated by Wolf Blitzer?
Kerry has his work cut out for him. He's running against Bush AND the media. As the documentaries "Outfoxed" and "Orwell Rolls in His Grave" confirms, the news divisions of the networks and of cable television are just extensions of the corporate politics of their owners.
The Democrats can't start a conversation about the lies of Bush and the Republicans because Republicans own and run the media conglomerates that control the echo chamber.
In just one of many examples, on Wednesday night and Thursday the television GOP corporate news shills were blabbering on about Kerry being a flip-flopper again. This is only because the GOP "response team" in Boston released a videotape of Kerry talking about his views on the Iraq War.
Yet no one who reads BuzzFlash can think of a single commentator who mentioned that Bush declared himself a "war president" one day and a "peace president" the next or that many people who initially supported Bush's invasion of Iraq did so because Bush lied about Iraq's WMDs and Iraq's connections to Al Qaeda. But, for the mainstream media, it's more important that Kerry changed his mind when he discovered Bush lied than that nearly a thousand Americans died fighting in Iraq because of Bush's lies.
Hey, if it's not a GOP attack message point of the day, Dan, Tom and Peter don't consider it news.
So, to the millionaire megaphones for the GOP who presume to call themselves journalists, we present you with the dubious honor of being designated the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrites of the Week.
Until next week, remember our motto at BuzzFlash.com, so many Republican hypocrites, so little time.
Catch up with you soon.
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Also see: "Convention watched, just not on Big Three"