"It was a beautiful day on the Mall, and who doesn't like kicking the press around, but speaking of ants, media bias and hyperbole seem like pretty small targets when unemployment is near 10 percent, vast amounts of unregulated cash are being spent in the election's closing days, and no American governing institution -- not the Senate, not the House of Representatives, not even the Supreme Court -- seems to be above petty partisan bickering.
"Mr. Stewart couldn't really go there and instead suggested it was those guys over there in the press tent who had the blood of democracy on their hands."
But the truth is that the mainstream media is guilty as charged here. The U.S. news media has not acted as a courageous Fourth Estate that was granted special constitutional protections so it could pierce through high-level wrongdoing and keep the voters informed.
Rather than a source of illumination and transparency, the news media for the most part has become one more brick in the wall.
As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof acknowledged on Sunday the press has been piling on President Barack Obama this year much like it pounded Al Gore before Election 2000. "We in the news media were tough on Mr. Gore, magnifying his weaknesses, and that fed into a general disdain" that led to George W. Bush's gaining the White House, Kristof wrote.
In fact, the media's hazing of Gore including misquoting him and then holding him up to ridicule for the misquotes was an important factor in why Gore's victory margin was slim enough, both nationally and in Florida, for Bush to flip the outcome with the help of Republicans on the Supreme Court. [For details, see Neck Deep.]
That pivotal election, in turn, set the stage for today's calamities, including the near 10 percent unemployment resulting from Bush's bubble-and-bust economics. The flood of secret campaign donations now washing away the last vestiges of American democracy was made possible by Bush's right-wing appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Favored Narrative
Even today, by refusing to apply any objective standards in measuring crowd sizes, the media has perpetuated this campaign year's dominant narrative that a massive Tea Party movement of angry voters represents a tidal wave that will restore Republicans to power.
The major news media and the cable-TV pundits have been flogging this narrative since March of 2009, just weeks after Obama became President.
Supposedly, there are these vast numbers of insurgent middle-class Americans fired up by the Tea Party who are determined to punish Democrats for passing any stimulus spending at all, for approving any new regulations for Wall Street, for enacting any health-care reform, for favoring any plan to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, and for opposing tax breaks for the richest Americans.
A favorite media explanation for this phenomenon has been to blame Obama for failing to communicate better. Yet, the media seems oblivious to the fact that its superficial treatment of these pressing national issues and the excessive coverage of Tea Party complaints have been key factors in the expected Republican landslide on Tuesday.
The appearance of hundreds of thousands of Americans on the National Mall on Saturday far outnumbering the crowd that attended Glenn Beck's rally in August represented one last chance for the news media to correct the imbalance of its coverage.
There also was a chance to discuss what it means when truly vast numbers of Americans think that the U.S. media/political process has gone insane, that they are so concerned about this public madness that hundreds of thousands traveled to the Washington Mall, squeezed through a daunting throng of humanity and strained to hear Stewart and associates.
Instead, by trivializing what happened on Saturday, the U.S. press corps reminded many progressive and middle-of-the-road Americans why they distrust the mainstream news media, which they see as pandering to the Right.
Though clearly satirical, the "rally to restore sanity" was downright serious. But that was a point the news media missed.
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