As most of us are well aware, the vast majority of the corporate, legacy media is utter dreck: false equivalencies run amok; superficiality and focus on style (Obama wasn’t smiling! Biden WAS smiling!) instead of substance (e.g., Romney and Ryan lying their asses off about everything); egregious errors left and right (e.g., Martha Raddatz stating, completely incorrectly, that Social Security is going bankrupt – as Dave Roberts of Grist points out, it most certainly IS NOT); all “horse race”/”who’s up and who’s down”; completely ignoring major issues, like energy and the environment (global warming, the #1 crisis facing humanity, so far not mentioned once); etc. It’s utterly depressing and infuriating.
Fortunately, there are a few bright spots in the generally brain-dead, bend-over-backwards-to-not-piss-off-the-crazy-right-wing media. One of them is Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, who is out with a superb new article entitled everyone (particularly the aforementioned lamestream media morons) needs to read, entitled The Vice Presidential Debate: Joe Biden Was Right to Laugh (“Biden did absolutely roll his eyes, snort, laugh derisively and throw his hands up in the air whenever Ryan trotted out his little beady-eyed BS-isms“). Why was Biden right to react this way? Very simple:
…He was absolutely right to be doing it. We all should be doing it. That includes all of us in the media, and not just paid obnoxious-opinion-merchants like me, but so-called “objective” news reporters as well. We should all be rolling our eyes, and scoffing and saying, “Come back when you’re serious.”
The load of balls that both Romney and Ryan have been pushing out there for this whole election season is simply not intellectually serious. Most of their platform isn’t even a real platform, it’s a fourth-rate parlor trick designed to paper over the real agenda – cutting taxes even more for super-rich dickheads like Mitt Romney, and getting everyone else to pay the bill.
The bottom line, in Taibbi’s view – and he’s absolutely correct on this – is that the Romney/Ryan campaign is an utterly cynical Big Lie, so bad that “we should take patriotic offense that anyone is trying to seize the White House using such transparently childish and dishonest tactics.” And yet the cowardly corporate media (terrified of the right-wing bullies) completely fails to do its job, which is to call a spade a spade. In this case, that would be reporting the facts – and they ARE empirically verifiable, demonstrable facts – that the Romney/Ryan platform is not laughable in only one possible context: “if you’re a multi-millionaire and you recognize that this is the only way to sell your agenda to mass audiences.” But if you’re not a multi-millionaire using your millions to manipulate public opinion in your favor, then, as Taibbi concludes:
…you should laugh, you should roll your eyes, and it doesn’t matter if you’re the Vice President or an ABC reporter or a toll operator. You should laugh, because this stuff is a joke, and we shouldn’t take it seriously.
By the way, we should also be laughing at drivel like this article, a front-page story in the New York Times (supposedly the best newspaper in the country – sigh…), focused not in the least bit on substance, but instead on how Sarah Palin and other assorted Teapublican crazies (e.g., Rand Paul) feel about Joe Biden “showing his teeth” last night. Seriously, this is intended as real “news,” but in fact it’s a pathetic joke, yet another sign of the sad decline of the corporate media, as they desperately claw for “eyeballs.” It almost makes me want to claw out my eyeballs. Either that, or just laugh hysterically at the idiocy of it all…
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