Martha Raddatz and the faux objectivity of journalists
Establishment journalists are creatures of a highly ideological world and often cause ideology to masquerade as neutral fact.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/12/raddatz-debate-objectivity
Poor Glenn. So much dysfunction, so little time to express outrage.
This was interesting on several levels. I didn’t watch the debate (since didn’t watch the Romney/Obama debate either (didn’t want to have to buy a new TV) why bother with this totally pointless VP debate?) but have read several commentaries on it. What stands out on this article is that the focus is on the so-called objective moderator rather than whatever idiocies are emitted by the two blithering debaters. While there is certainly no guarantee that having good questions asked would result in clear, unambiguous and meaningful responses, you can be confident that without asking good questions there will be no opportunity. As Glenn so eloquently points out, Iran is absolutely no threat to the US whatsoever. None, zip, nada, zero, any other description of nothing you can slip in here. Neither was Iraq, of course, but that didn’t stop us from pissing away a trillion dollars (of borrowed money!) and killing at least 100K Iraqi civilians. So, the world’s only superpower is being threatened by Iran? How ludicrous! Still, as pointed out, that subject was not even approached, let alone discussed.
Also, as Glenn pointed out, the nonsense about social security and medicare. SS is fully funded if we accept that the US’s IOUs are worth anything (the world seems to think so, our government’s borrowing rates are at historical lows), though those IOUs, naturally, have to be paid back with borrowed money because we have a Congress that refuses to let the Bush tax cuts expire or close any loopholes (the ‘carried interest rule’, no matter how trivial the increased revenues would be, is a _very_ sore point for me!), so can’t pay back with actual revenues. Medicare is only ‘insolvent’ if one accepts that there is nothing we as a nation can do to get a handle on the spiraling costs of health care (why is it that other countries pay less, per capita, than we do, yet have better outcomes? sure seems to me we have room to improve!), if we can get the rate of increase to match inflation then suddenly there isn’t any problem at all.
Why is it that ‘objective’ journalists never ask these questions? As Glenn says, it is because they are neither objective or unbiased, but are instead completely captured by the elite in parroting whatever nonsense the oligarchy want to feed the sheeple.
And the sheeple eat it all up and ask for more!
