Thursday, January 24, 2008

Pretty Please Focus on the Politics

How can you not appreciate an article that begins with the sentence, " The media are hopelessly sexist and relentlessly trivial"? Even better that The Weepy Witch and The Secret Muslim follows later with, "It just means that the public expression of racism is beyond the pale in a way that the public expression of misogyny is not."

I implore each person to vote for the candidate that best represents her/his views and needs rather than race or gender because I fear that Katha Pollitt is right in her closing remarks, "If the campaign becomes a competition between race and gender...the winner on election day will be whichever white man the Republican Party nominates."

4 comments:

habladora said...

You lose your press, you lose your democracy - and I fear that we have a tenuous grasp on both at the moment. I really dream of a media outlet that is not trying to compete with sitcoms and reality TV shows by pushing only sensational, gossipy stories. You cannot make MSNBC or CNN have a real discussion about a candidate's voting record or policies these days.

Can we pitch a "real news hour" to the TV executives and convince the media moguls that they have lost a portion of their potential consumer base and that we would come back if only they would say something worth hearing? How do we save journalism in this country?

Mächtige Maus said...

Alas...the pessimist in me believes that the media is not concerned with the consumer base that they have lost. Why should they? Clearly, tawdry sells. As does misinformation. And...well, I'm not sure there is enough room in this posting section to cover all the things that seem to win out over common sense.

habladora said...

Alright, I'm not sold on Hillary Clinton for the following reasons - she voted for the war and she seems to be running a pretty dirty campaign against Obama, who I do really like. I would really love to be persuaded though... the problem is, of course, that finding substantive information about her can be challenging when the press seems to be determined to focus on superficial things (as previously mentioned here and, of course, here). Can anyone point me to a more meaningful discussion of her policies?

Anonymous said...

Gotta love Margaret Cho's response to this.