Divided Empire With Media Kings I Hold
It's clear that Hillary has won the March 4 Primaries in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island yesterday, and in Ohio by a pretty handy margin. She pulled out what she needed to in order to convince people she's real player in this race and is making it impossible to write her off. While mathematically it's almost impossible for either side to win, it will keep the fight alive for both of them. Pennsylvania is the next primary on the schedule seven weeks away, which means both candidates will be covering the entire state to try and eke out a small margin of victory. They will then try to make the small victory seem bigger as they go on to the convention, where the real wheeling and dealing will begin. No mandate, mind you, but possibly enough just to convince the superdelegates to go his or her way and call it a victory. More importantly, it means the media will be almost giddy in continuing to cover all the political stories they can between now and whenever this race ends. They get to cover all the meaningless stories like staffers in-fighting, donut spending and who loves America more. You know, the things that matter when deciding a president.
And now all the 24 hours news channels, political blogs and newspapers get to have more to talk about, compare and contrast. The Republicans get to look organized, dignified and and generally more adult in comparison to the Democrats, who get to look like they're about to break into Jets and Sharks style warfare. Analysts will analyze, the spin doctors will spin like crazy why his or her candidate is the only one ready to lead the nation and why this fight makes him or her actually better. The talking heads get to stop making sense and talk about the inner minutia of the campaign. And all of us watching get to soak it all in. The Hillary supporters get to point how she stopped Obama's momentum, and should thus be the next president of the United States, the Obama people can still point to the fact he's won of the last contests and and still has much of the popular vote, and the McCain people can point to how handily he's won his nomination and the Democrats are still bickering like angry parents in front of their kids. And the shows, blogs and whoever will still put all this up for the masses to consume, and we will. We have seven weeks between the Texas and Ohio primaries and we need something or some kind of coverage that will both fill the time and remind people to be interested in the campaigns. And by people, I mean not me since I'll be interested no matter what. It's the people who might turn to Jerry Springer who need to be kept in the race.
And the only way to make sure of that is to use the more salacious tidbits of the political world, of which there are plenty, and not using words like salacious. Intellectual analysis will be cast aside for Limbaugh getting his words quoted on CNN. Also, doesn't that fuck with his entire "liberal media bias" vibe he keeps putting out there? Pat Buchanan will keep spouting off on MSNBC, talking about the badness of McCain not being conservative enough and the power of Clinton to steamroll everyone, with possible Vince Foster references thrown in for fun (note, wikipedia is used there since there's too much bullshit to cut through to talk about it properly, so wiki will help me talk about it improperly). We'll get the more extreme blogs quoted since people find them interesting. A lot of people don't want in depth analysis of a complicated issue, because a lot of people can't keep up with that. People want to hear about the one paragraph from some raving moron with more bandwidth than sense. People want to hear about things that will give them an emotional response, rather than an intellectual response. An intellectual response usually results in the capital sin of media. Boring.
This is why blogs keep getting play on the major media markets. They're badly written, poorly researched and mostly cribbed from the work of real reporters but they're strongly opinionated. Yes, especially this one. I'm not out on the campaign trail giving a view from the trenches, I'm not talking with party pezzonavante, I'm just an idiot with internet. But the blogs go on, real reporters read them so they can quote someone else saying the things they really want to say but can't, and the ratings go higher because people keep getting mad at it all. Look at CNNs televised opinion shows: Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck. Neither one of these guys is the epitome of warm and fuzzy. Neither one of these guys is about reasoned, intellectual debate, they're just about an agenda. Note, this is their right as Americans and God bless them for being able to make money on it, but really they're just a couple of blowhards. Chris Matthews on MSNBC walks that line between angry guy yelling at people and old political hand looking to inject his experience into the debates. Keith Olberman of MSNBC is a former ESPN reporter who jumped networks and found himself a political/current affairs guru. It doesn't take much formal training to do this/that job, just an appetite for reading crap and regurgitating it in an entertaining manner. And they've all picked sides in the campaign and contribute to any number of biases out there.
And there are multiple biases out there and they change from minute to minute. for the better part of 2007, on the Democratic side Hillary Clinton was seen as the presumptive nominee and ran the error free campaign everyone wanted to emulate. Obama was seen as the upstart kid who should get out of her way since it was her turn. Giuliani for the Republicans was seen as the golden boy, McCain as the once maverick who's making a cute run but should stop, Huckabee as the "what the hell" candidate, Romney as the smart businessman and they all looked for the "real conservative" to come out of the woodwork. So they kept praising Fred Thomspson, for months, until he announced he was running and then no one cared. The media were wetting themselves about a Thompson run for months, almost to the point of saying he had waited too long, but then he actually got in the race and his coverage all but stopped, or at least the talking heads stopping talking about him. And the world turned. Clinton started to be the same old song and dance, the Democratic field got winnowed, so attention turned to Obama. Clinton let her total contempt for the media out, and Obama got more attention. Obama started to win more races, and he got more attention and favor. Now, Clinton has won, so expect the see saw to push her higher. People are forgetting Obama has the delegate lead, just like they forgot that for a while when Hillary was ahead.
After all, that was yesterday's news.
So it is written, so do I see it.
And now all the 24 hours news channels, political blogs and newspapers get to have more to talk about, compare and contrast. The Republicans get to look organized, dignified and and generally more adult in comparison to the Democrats, who get to look like they're about to break into Jets and Sharks style warfare. Analysts will analyze, the spin doctors will spin like crazy why his or her candidate is the only one ready to lead the nation and why this fight makes him or her actually better. The talking heads get to stop making sense and talk about the inner minutia of the campaign. And all of us watching get to soak it all in. The Hillary supporters get to point how she stopped Obama's momentum, and should thus be the next president of the United States, the Obama people can still point to the fact he's won of the last contests and and still has much of the popular vote, and the McCain people can point to how handily he's won his nomination and the Democrats are still bickering like angry parents in front of their kids. And the shows, blogs and whoever will still put all this up for the masses to consume, and we will. We have seven weeks between the Texas and Ohio primaries and we need something or some kind of coverage that will both fill the time and remind people to be interested in the campaigns. And by people, I mean not me since I'll be interested no matter what. It's the people who might turn to Jerry Springer who need to be kept in the race.
And the only way to make sure of that is to use the more salacious tidbits of the political world, of which there are plenty, and not using words like salacious. Intellectual analysis will be cast aside for Limbaugh getting his words quoted on CNN. Also, doesn't that fuck with his entire "liberal media bias" vibe he keeps putting out there? Pat Buchanan will keep spouting off on MSNBC, talking about the badness of McCain not being conservative enough and the power of Clinton to steamroll everyone, with possible Vince Foster references thrown in for fun (note, wikipedia is used there since there's too much bullshit to cut through to talk about it properly, so wiki will help me talk about it improperly). We'll get the more extreme blogs quoted since people find them interesting. A lot of people don't want in depth analysis of a complicated issue, because a lot of people can't keep up with that. People want to hear about the one paragraph from some raving moron with more bandwidth than sense. People want to hear about things that will give them an emotional response, rather than an intellectual response. An intellectual response usually results in the capital sin of media. Boring.
This is why blogs keep getting play on the major media markets. They're badly written, poorly researched and mostly cribbed from the work of real reporters but they're strongly opinionated. Yes, especially this one. I'm not out on the campaign trail giving a view from the trenches, I'm not talking with party pezzonavante, I'm just an idiot with internet. But the blogs go on, real reporters read them so they can quote someone else saying the things they really want to say but can't, and the ratings go higher because people keep getting mad at it all. Look at CNNs televised opinion shows: Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck. Neither one of these guys is the epitome of warm and fuzzy. Neither one of these guys is about reasoned, intellectual debate, they're just about an agenda. Note, this is their right as Americans and God bless them for being able to make money on it, but really they're just a couple of blowhards. Chris Matthews on MSNBC walks that line between angry guy yelling at people and old political hand looking to inject his experience into the debates. Keith Olberman of MSNBC is a former ESPN reporter who jumped networks and found himself a political/current affairs guru. It doesn't take much formal training to do this/that job, just an appetite for reading crap and regurgitating it in an entertaining manner. And they've all picked sides in the campaign and contribute to any number of biases out there.
And there are multiple biases out there and they change from minute to minute. for the better part of 2007, on the Democratic side Hillary Clinton was seen as the presumptive nominee and ran the error free campaign everyone wanted to emulate. Obama was seen as the upstart kid who should get out of her way since it was her turn. Giuliani for the Republicans was seen as the golden boy, McCain as the once maverick who's making a cute run but should stop, Huckabee as the "what the hell" candidate, Romney as the smart businessman and they all looked for the "real conservative" to come out of the woodwork. So they kept praising Fred Thomspson, for months, until he announced he was running and then no one cared. The media were wetting themselves about a Thompson run for months, almost to the point of saying he had waited too long, but then he actually got in the race and his coverage all but stopped, or at least the talking heads stopping talking about him. And the world turned. Clinton started to be the same old song and dance, the Democratic field got winnowed, so attention turned to Obama. Clinton let her total contempt for the media out, and Obama got more attention. Obama started to win more races, and he got more attention and favor. Now, Clinton has won, so expect the see saw to push her higher. People are forgetting Obama has the delegate lead, just like they forgot that for a while when Hillary was ahead.
After all, that was yesterday's news.
So it is written, so do I see it.