Your Mainstream Media At Work

[filkertom]

Quite apart from how I feel about the various candidates... boy, none of the talking heads or newscasts or newspapers or any frickin' body wants to even admit the existence of John Edwards and Ron Paul, do they? Discuss.

Comments

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

Pundits & editors do not want to admit to the existence of people whose appeal they cannot explain in a sentence (or, preferably, a fragment).

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

It's Teh Scary to admit to the existence of folks who don't agree with you and can't be controlled. Huckabee was in that category, too, until he won Iowa -- now, he's simply wearing a red-shirted Federation uniform (figuratively speaking).

[jss]

23rd C. red or 24th C. mustard, but yes.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know the expression is kind of specific, but who groks "yellowshirts" in that context? (As opposed to, say, college athletics, where "redshirt" has an entirely DIFFERENT meaning.)

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Well, I for one *hope* he's a redshirt! Nobody I know who lives in his state wants him.
From what I saw, the media was just going for straight name recognition, they were giving McCane more air time though he didn't win IO.

[morpheus0013.livejournal.com]

I must be reading different news sources or something, because I hear about Edwards and Paul all the time.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Which ones? 'Cause they're all over the blogosphere, but rather harder to find on the Corpulent Media, and (as Uncle Lumpy notes below) almost never positively

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

I hear of and from John Edwards very frequently on NPR and Air America. I still haven't heard much re Ron Paul in those venues.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Bluntly, and it pains me to say because I listen to it all the time, Air America is not, period. NPR, yeah, but not to the mythical "people in the heartland". I mean ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN/Fox (both radio and TV) and to an extent MSNBC.

[emiofbrie.livejournal.com]

Hell, Fox News is trying to bar Ron Paul from debates...

[tcgtrf.livejournal.com]

The New Hampshire Republican party has pulled their support from the Fox debate over that issue, as a matter of fact.

TC

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

Oh, they acknowledge their existence.

You'd be hard pressed to find a positive example, though.

[salkryn.livejournal.com]

*Shrug* I tend to avoid the blood-sucking media whenever possible. My guess is that they are ignoring them in the hope that they can make them go away if they refuse to acknowledge their existence.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

John Who? Ron Who?

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is that the stupid level that what passes for journalism has sunk to can't really handle the concept of more than two answers to a question. They want to reduce an election to "the front runner" and "the challenger". Anyone who isn't in the top two doesn't fit into the microcephalic paradigm of breaking any issue down into just two sides that must then be presented in a "balanced" way, so they don't really know what to do with it, and if they don't know how to deal with it, and they think they can get away with ignoring it, they will. It's the same problem that third party candidates have getting any oxygen in the general election -- they don't fit the pattern, so "newspeople" hired for having good hair rather than having anything under their hair would get flustered if they actually had to deal with them.

This is not to dismiss the idea that corporate media actively want to suppress candidates that make them particularly uncomfortable. But the conscious evil of corporate media is only a small part of the problem.

[moquif.livejournal.com]

Are you sure the problem is with the media or is the media reacting to the public? I think that the American public wants things dumbed down into sound bites. I solidly believe part of why the GOP has been successful is its ability to reduce complex issues into a short slogan that ignores the subtleties that wind up making a big difference. Like "you're with us or you're against us". Simple answers are preferred because then you don't have to think much.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

There is something of a chicken and egg thing going on. The advertising culture conditions the audience to be morons that can't handle more than a trivial sound bite, and the audience that tunes out anything more than a trivial sound bite conditions the media to keep it stupid.

The mess we live in is a huge net of interconnected problems all feeding on each other.

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

I see John Edwards everywhere -- but the only mention of Ron Paul I've seen are his campaign workers, and damn few of them. Otherwise, I'd have never heard of him.

On the other hand, they're both no-hopers. Is it really worth spending time on people who just aren't going to get elected?

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

Edwards will probably be VP. He's the token white male.

[n-e-star.livejournal.com]

I hear about Ron Paul on C-Span at odd hours and from the billboard downtown.

[hugh57.livejournal.com]

I've seen a fair amount of Edwards on CNN - he did come in second in Iowa after all, ahead of Clinton, so they couldn't ignore him entirely. Ron Paul could have been RuPaul for all anyone at CNN knew, however.

[idiotgrrl.livejournal.com]

OR Bill Richardson.