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An Open Letter To The American Media

posted by Carl Newman at 11:15 am.

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Isn’t the news exciting? I’ve been watching more of it lately and boy is it thrilling. I watch CNN and MSNBC mostly, who pretend to be the most serious.

However, these days, being the most serious televised political program in America seems a lot like having the biggest dick in your kindergarten class.

The easiest way for me to explain why I miss watching the BBC is this: Every day, on every political channel, at least once a day, one of the tittering heads says this sentence:

“The Republican brand is in trouble.”

The brand. The fucking brand.

People talk about the bias of media all the time, and it’s all bullshit. It’s not political slant, it’s a bias towards the stories (and the method of telling them) that gets the most viewers. They’re all whores to various degrees. They read whatever story comes up on the teleprompter, written by whatever unpaid journalism intern was assigned to the story by an editor hired by a producer who’s job is to make sure they cut away from Wolf Blitzer in time to show the advertisements for pills to make your stool softer and your dick harder.

I watched Wolf Blitzer do an extended feature on Britney Spears’ custody battle, and knew then that journalism had been poisoned to a point of no return.

As I watch the current “political” news I see that truth itself is under attack. Lewis Black says the problem is that the way stories are spun now, for every issue there is a set of Democrat facts and a set of Republican facts. And that there aren’t any more “Fact facts.”

Just two different sales pitches.

Which is what is truly disturbing to me about the “Republican brand” comment that gets repeated over and over. That’s the direction that politics is moving in American culture. It’s just another consumer decision. Just a battle for market share, instead of the struggle to convince voters that the right they have to choose their elected officials is sacred and that the men who vie for them present their plans for the challenges ahead of this country and the world, and display their character as a way of judging how they would handle the challenges that lie ahead, waiting in ambush and unknown to all of us.

Instead it’s two different spokesmen, with marketing departments (press secretaries and speech writers), production staff (policy “advisers”), and all the other dressings of the modern American corporation. I believe that the presidency of the United States is a sacred trust that imbues one individual with the power to change the world, and it should be taken very seriously and we should discuss it in a manner befitting it’s importance.

Instead, all I hear is “analysis” from “experts” on how the candidates are being “perceived by the American voter.” And that’s not a testament to decisions or leadership, it’s a ratings test, just like the ones that have ruined televised journalism. Political news is a series of people (typically uninvolved in any current political campaign) playing eight second clips of John McCain saying “Czechoslovakia” And then they say things like:

“McCain’s strength is that he appears more experienced in foreign policy, and this gaffe will hurt that perception.”

Just like when I think of Buick’s I immediately connect it with reliability.

And this is separate from what the candidates are actually doing or saying, it’s in the coverage of it. I’ll be addressing the candidates at a later time.

It’s not the Race to the White House anymore.

It’s the fucking Pepsi challenge.

America as seen by political news teams

Carl Newman: appreciates when you don't feel like commenting, but still want to tell him what an asshole he is at warriorpoetresponds@gmail.com