The Fainting Goat Media

 

I simply no longer know what to make of the Corporate Media. They have become so erratic in covering the U.S. presidential race that the easy explanations like “following the corporate line” no longer seem to suffice. It appears clear to me that the MSM is always dancing to the unseen hand – usually the Republican Party but not always. Occasionally they appear to be trying to please the left as well. I don’t like their inaccuracies and biases when they coincide with my views anymore than I do when they go against my politics.

I am beginning to think this erratic coverage has more to do with incompetence and a lack of awareness and direction than anything else.

This is not funny.

 
Hat tip to online journalist Glenn Greenwald for the title idea (because CNN and other outlets kept showing the Fainting Goat story throughout their political coverage last week), and someone at Daily Kos for the warning picture. Crazy .

I found the picture and more information than I ever wanted about fainting goats here.

Republicans to The Media: We Make You Dance

 

During the selling of the Iraq War, the Traditional or Corporate Media sold its soul and what was left of its integrity in order to feel they had a rightful place at the table of power and plenty alongside the so called social, political or moneyed elites who have no allegiance to anything an average North American citizen would be able to identify with.

Except maybe fear.

Since then, the media has only very occasionally shown signs of the appropriate remorse that should be the wages of the shocking and amoral behavior they stand complicit in and guilty of.

On CNN, the interviewers like Campbell Brown and Anderson Cooper have recently taken to timidly and nervously standing up to some of the less important lies, spins and twists vomited out by the politicians and their sycophants who are usually – but not always – Republicans.

 With the Sarah Palin idiocy, they have once again been given an opportunity to stand up to the unending bullshit dished by the right wing on an issue that, in my view, no intelligent person would give even a moment of serious consideration to – that being Palin’s qualifications to be Commander in Chief should McCain be incapacitated.

 But for the most part, the media continues to be a fearful dog wagged by a vicious right wing tail.

 The Republicans are happy to pretend to be outraged that the discourse has become about unwed teen-age mothers or a woman’s right to work while raising a family. They are happy to do this because as long as they are talking about this, no one is asking them about Iraq, Katrina, corruption, torture or any one of dozens of issues they would definitely rather not address.

 So in the end, the mass media does what they have been doing for decades. They embarrass themselves and insult the rest of us while dancing to the bizarre, twisted, discordant and almost entirely imaginary Republican songbook in hopes of favors and access.

 CNN has made progress, but they are light years away from redeeming themselves, if indeed redemption is available when the crime involves thousands upon thousands of dead and horribly disfigured Iraqi men, woman and children.

 Meanwhile, Rome burns, the Republicans fiddle, the media dances and the people look on in baffled amazement.

Isn’t politics grand?