In most policy debates, the media preference is for a solution in the “center,” whatever they define that to be. A Los Angeles Times headline today on the Beltway debate on Afghanistan reads: “Obama mulls middle ground in Afghanistan war strategy.” Like the healthcare debate, the media’s version of “the middle” usually means something well to the right of actual public opinion.
In this case, it’s even harder to follow than that; as the Times puts it, Obama “suggested he is looking at the middle range of the spectrum, somewhere between a major increase in forces and a large drawdown.”
Well that’s a rather wide spectrum, isn’t it? If you look at polls of the public, there is very little support for sending more troops–and much more support for either keeping troop levels where they are, or decreasing the size of U.S. forces in the country. So the “middle” ground isn’t so hard to locate–it’s somewhere between decreasing U.S. forcesor keeping them at current levels.The fact that the debate in Washington doesn’t seem to reflect that is, of course, telling; perhaps a more open media debate would change that.
Huh?
latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-obama-afghan7-2009oct07,0,3693182.story
We can’t really blame politicians for lying to us. It’s what most of us want. In almost every case in the last 100 years when a politician has expressed an unpopular truth they have lost the next election or been recalled.
The cost of running a campaign is so exhobitant that it is almost impossible to do without patronage from corporations and the wealthy. We know that they don’t give out money without expecting a larger return than their investment.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again and again. What the news media does is treason. They say they broadcast news. Our founding fathers established a free press so that an informed electorate armed with the truth can make the best choices to “…form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity,…” I know that some, so called, newspeople would consider that so much liberal claptrap.
By focusing on irrelevant male bovine excrement, false propaganda sources and creating a distraction from an impartial, unbiased presentation of all of the pertinent facts the news media is violating the sacred trust granted them by the First Amendment. Some are worse than others, but as a class the news media is abrogating their responsibility to inform the public. Both of these repudiations of your sacred trust. It borders on treason.
NO! It is treason.
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