Mainstream media shows its maturity and balance again
Here’s how you write a good political headline:
Ron Paul Emerging As More Of A GOP Contender
This is from a CBS Denver Affiliate December 21st 2007. I can agree with it based on my own heavy news reading, although I believe he’s already well “emerged.” Considering he’s done well for months and months of smaller polls and of course all the money he’s earned from a hundred thousand or more individual donations.
Now here’s how you demonstrate your bias and bullshit agenda (from a day earlier than the above):
Will Ron Paul Play Spoiler?
And you know what’s really great? This is CBS national news. So we have an affiliate that must have seen the national headline and editors said, “our program and site is better than that, better than our parent company.” Denver has had a reputation of a good news market in the past. I don’t know if it’s true always, but here it definitely is. CBS national news is also following leads from elsewhere. Yahoo guilty, along with the AP this time, which makes me ready to drop their email all together. Bye Bye Yahoo Mail!
Paul shaping up as spoiler in GOP race
I’m not going to spend time analyzing this. What’s the point? I’ll spend the time writing letters. Let’s just identify something. The Yahoo story is from an AP feed. Who wrote the headline? And why is the headline, not part of the URL? Instead the URL uses a quote from the biased story “news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071220/ap_po/anti_war_asterisk.” In the story, it states that Ron Paul was not long ago, an Anti-War asterisk in the race for republican nomination. What exactly does that mean? Can somebody tell me if this comes from common political jargon? An asterisk. And don’t get me wrong, if you write Hillary Clinton, blah blah “asterisk“, I’m still left wondering if that’s like “special candidate” or footnote? It’s anything but an informational label for someone, we know that. And we know that news is supposed to be facts, not labels and stereotypes. Why is this allowed, and then even worse, tolerated.
Let’s get something straight here. There are no such things as spoilers. People still believe that there are, and stories are manipulated that way. When you have two shitty candidates, you simply have voters in a 3rd, 4th and 5th group that just don’t vote. And they still have something called a write-in vote. Mickey Mouse is still doing well there too. So to say that one candidate has a function of merely pulling votes away from another, is false.
December 22, 2007 at 4:14 pm | media, politics, rants | No comment
