Whatever hope John Kerry had of closing the gap ended when Osama bin Laden became part of the national conversation about this election. As I’ve said a hundred times Kerry wins 10 states, plus Hawaii (maybe).
So is it too early to consider the winners and losers in this election? And the big loser is NOT John Kerry. He was already a los…. No, seriously. He’ll be back in the US Senate and in his 15th Century English farmhouse in Idaho (it’s a long story) enjoying a quiet Christmas with his wife, his family and their contingent of servant.
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No, the biggest loser in the 2004 election is the mainstream media. This has been the ugliest example of self-inflicted bloodshed since they passed around the Kool-Aid in French Guyana.
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Dan Rather. CBS. 60 Minutes. The New York Times. Even Walter Cronkite (see below) has gone down with the ship.
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The media’s overtly partisan coverage and blatant attempts to affect the outcome of the election are beyond outrageous. They’ve reached the threshold of pathetic. Maybe I’m naive about journalists, maybe I hold them in too high a regard (my son, after all, is named “Mencken”). But the profession of journalism is rooted in reason and objective, reportable fact. When the press decides to abandon reason, to dismiss objectivity as a valued commodity, to even abandon the need for facts to be facts (remember “fake, but accurate?), then journalism as a profession is dead.
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In service to as insignificant a Democrat as John Kerry, America’s press corps has abandoned its principles so blatantly that they can never be recovered. We have re-entered the era of the “penny press,” when media outlets were openly run as organs of various political or cultural interests. The day of the “professional” reporter is gone.
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When I first started calling my local paper the “Washington Post-Democrat” on my radio show, the name was supposed to be a joke. Now, the joke is true and it’s the reporting that’s laughable.
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My question to the MSM us, “Was it worth it?”