The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand
Jan 6th, 2008 at 8:41 am by Susie
John Edwards continues to be ignored by the corporate media.
The media is up to what it loves to do: Decide for you who the next president should be. Not only should he not be the president, neither should that stuck-up, conceited know-it-all Hillary Clinton. And we’re not going to let you.
This was the single most depressing thing about the campaign I worked - it’s really not just some blogger illusion. The high priests of the media really do think they know best, they really do think you shouldn’t get to pick, and they take their self-appointed gatekeeper status very seriously. Democracy is a nice idea - they just don’t want you to actually use it. Like many people who live mostly in their heads, they’re singularly arrogant about their own intellect.
The thing is, they rarely know as much as they think they do. By nature of their education and financial status, they’re not sensitive to the same social and economic nuance as the rest of us. They tend to live in enclaves of people much like themselves: highly educated, financially secure (at least until their papers get sold and the new owners start laying off) and on some level, detached from the reality the rest of us face.
And because so many of them are high school misfits at heart, they’re very susceptible to flattery and manipulation by politicians, who after all, are people who flatter and manipulate for a living.
If John Edwards, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama go down on their merits, that’s democracy. If they go down because the media decided they just don’t like them, that’s a travesty.
The problem is how can you be certain what determined how the voters voted? Perhaps the voters ignored the MSM slant and voted the way they felt. Or maybe your theory is correct. Tough to really tell which huh?
Did you notice the derisive laugh Charlie Gibson got last night when he posed a hypothetical question about the combined wages of two married professors at St. Anselm, the school where the debate was held? He suggested the two earned upwards of $200K and thus would be losers if the Bush tax cuts were repealed.
The audience exploded. Hillary told him “Maybe at NYU, Charlie.” Gibson didn’t even look chastened.
They really should get out more.
$200K each, or $200K total?