Taking serious matters seriously

This pretty much sums it up. From my favorite blog, Hullabaloo.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

The reason those comments over race got more attention than, say, the candidates' competing economic stimulus packages is that the traditional media doesn't really want to understand them. They'll hide behind the argument that nuts and bolts issues don't post big ratings, but really, they don't have the expertise to engage them. More often it's rollodex analysis, where men and women from think tanks, almost all of them either center-right or certified wingnut, and all with very defined and specific agendas, are brought in to opine without resistance, when these shows pay any lip service to the issues at all.

This is nothing new. I was reminded of this moment today.

KING: Okay. Were you impressed with this “fuzzy [math],” top 1 percent, 1.3 trillion, 1.9 trillion bit?

KOPPEL: You know, honestly, it turns my brains to mush. I can’t pretend for a minute that I’m really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about.

And Ted Koppel is arguably one of the most serious journalists on television.

Identity and personality is how we've been picking Presidents for a long time. Sometimes it works, sometimes you get George Bush. But I can't help but think that the malaise we all feel is part and parcel of a press corps that refuses to take serious matters seriously. They can't conceive of the real-world consequences behind numbers and facts and reality, preferring to discuss elections with the depth and penetrating insight of a Sweet Valley High novel or the local high school basketball game (an epic battle where two sides will mix it up!). So many of us are starving for a process that recognizes how much this all matters, how it's not a game played for the benefit of court jesters in ill-fitting suits, how the goal is not conflict, like a televised drama, but progress, which is too difficult for them to contemplate.