When your favorite “bands” include the Academy of St. Martin’s in the Field, Rolling Stone Magazine usually isn’t a must-read. But the scathing “Merchants of Trivia” by Matt Taibbi in the Jan. 24 edition is one of the best analyses of media coverage of the 2008 presidential race I’ve seen anywhere:
“The media has done its best to turn a once-promising race into an idiotic exchange of Nerf-insults, delivered at rah-rah campaign events utterly indistinguishable from scholastic pep rallies…” Taibbi writes. “And while it’s tempting to blame the candidates, deep in my black journalist’s heart I know it isn’t all their fault. We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race, and we turned it into a bag of s–t, just in the nick of time.”
Recommended Stories
Taibbi is at his brutally honest best when he talks about how the mainstream media does its dirty work:
“No matter which issues or grass-roots support elevate a candidate to the limelight, in order to stay there he ends up having to play this game, a sort of political version of Fear Factor in which candidates must eat bowl after bowl of metaphorical worms to prove their worthiness…’ Any candidates who refuse are viciously savaged by the journalistic pack.
The end result is “…widespread voter disgust, not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national press that smugly enforced the party insiders’ stranglehold on the process with its incessant bullying of dissident candidates….”
No wonder so many of our candidates for public office seem to be coming from the shallow end of the talent pool.
