The Shame of ABC
I guess ABC just wanted to demonstrate that they can be as vapid as CBS.
Comes word now that ABC is dropping coverage of the Kucinich, Sharpton, and Moseley-Braun campaigns, something they announced shortly after Kucinich verbally bitch-slapped Ted Koppel at the debate the other night. Although the timing looks suspicious, there is good cause to believe that this move was imminent anyway. If nothing else, there was Koppel's reference to their campaigns as "vanity" campaigns (as an aside, could somebody please explain that phrase to me? It seems to me that anybody running for President has a fair amount of vanity and presumption and, except for the press-annointed front-runners, all candidates are presumably long-shots. There is not a significant statistical difference between these three candidates and the other who consistently poll in single digits. So what is it?). Aside from that, Howard Kurtz's December 9 Washington Post article shows that the animous towards these candidates was already there. As Koppel put it, "How did Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun get into this thing?" Koppel asked. "Nobody seems to know. Some candidates who are perceived as serious are gasping for air, and what little oxygen there is on the stage will be taken up by one-third of the people who do not have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the nomination." Nice, eh? That's the cream of your national press corps, right there. Sorry to inconvenience you fellows, what with you having to deal with this riff raff cluttering up your pretty show.
Most galling, though, is that in terms of being newsworthy, or even of serving the public, Kucinich at the moment stands out above the other candidates; he is the only one who actually seems to have a job as a public servant and is doing it.
I would say this a sad day for both American media and politics when coverage of the canditates is dictated not by issues but by what's convenient for the media, but it has always been this way. We have a corrupt and lazy media and this is just the latest example. Such a shame that we have the First amendment with no apparent need for it.
|
