Sunday, December 02, 2007

"Intellectual venality" - The media critic for the Los Angeles Times absolutely excoriates CNN: "In any event, CNN has failed in its responsibilities to the political process and it's time for the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties to take the network out of our electoral affairs." And yet it's Fox News which is network non grata among the Democrats.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Times' media critic also says point blank that the U.S. economy is crippled (directly contradicting the GOP party line), brings up class differences creating a health care crisis (ditto), and completely glosses over the shocking "planted" gay general. But he trashes CNN severely, and that's what counts: strange bedfellows, eh?

The column starts to get silly about the point where he criticizes the "level of selectivity" created when CNN staffers "noxiously" sifted through the online submissions to choose questions. As if the debate parameters should instead have been determined by a freeform, 5,000-slot wheel of fortune? This assessment is immediately followed by the complaint that the debate was bogged down with a fringe topic like immigration. Yeah, they should've just hit YouTube questioners at random; that definitely would've improved the relevance. "Does the Governor agree that we should leeeeeave Britney alooooone?"

Where Rutten loses steam completely is when he asserts as fact that religious questions are "wicked" and "anathema," even for candidates touting their own faith as a central selling point their candidacies. "We do not and should not ask them," he writes, with no further explanation. This declaration will come as quite a surprise to those politicians or voters who have lived in America at any point since 1770.

Anonymous said...

One of the L.A. Times commenters nails it when he says the column reads like a random angry entry from somebody's blog. He wonders why it was printed in the news section, and he's right to wonder.

Anonymous said...

Also, somebody had better clue in the NRCC that voters don't care about immigration. They've just bought almost $300,000 in last-week ads for the 5th district in Ohio, which is holding a special election for the vacant Representative seat.

The late ads are exclusively about that "corrupt," "incompetent" topic that ratings-hungry CNN unethically poisoned the GOP debate with: immigration.