Memo to MSM: Cut the Crap

Our mainstream media gurus like to think of themselves as the channels and interpreters of the political scene, who look down on it all with a trained eye, such as the one who said on one of the Sunday-morning talk shows today that typical American voters might go for Mike Huckabee because their idea of a good time on Friday night is eating out at Applebee's, which sounds a lot like Huckabee.

Y'know, call me a skeptic, and there certainly is ample evidence for a lack of deep thinking among voters, but I just don't believe that the similarity between Applebee's and Huckabee is enough to sway the average American voter, nor is the tear in Hillary's eye sufficient to make women swoon with a sudden recognition of the supposed Ice Queen's humanity. Much less talked about was the Hillary campaign's effort to get out the vote and last-minute portrayal of Barack Obama as less committed to choice, which most likely resonated among many New Hampshire female voters.

The major inaccuracy in the pre-New Hampshire polls led many media pundits to flagellate themselves, and with good reason. This hard lesson apparently has not yet been learned: the media should report and analyze the news, not try to create it or get out in front of it. Don't read us someone's embargoed speech or summarize it before he delivers it. Don't try to project the winner before anyone has even voted. Stop pitting candidates against each other artificially or asking nothing but a long litany of "gotcha" hypotheticals. Don't ask the candidates to commit to some abstract future position on a policy. Don't take all the suspense out of life. Let the people decide and then report on the results. Polling is okay to show general trends, but it should not be taken as a guaranteed scientific plus-or-minus-three-points accuracy. Your viewers just don't care as much as you think they do whether you've got the "scoop" in advance of the other networks. They just want to see the news intelligently covered and analyzed.

I am so disappointed in the overall lack of quality of the debate questions, the inane pettiness of much of what passes for political commentary these days, the constant attempts to "corner" candidates and make them uncomfortable for no useful reason, and the deliberate stoking of arbitrary and trivial conflicts between candidates. I'll probably need surgery to keep my eyes from rolling back any further into my head. "Oooh, you just disagreed with something your husband said several years ago. Gotcha!" C'mon, cut the crap already. Get over yourselves, and get out of the way.

Tags: pundits, debates, candidates, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, campaign, mainstream media, Huckabee