Grow Some, Media
Until governor Sarah Palin gives a full press conference, it seems to me that the cable news outlets should stop running her stump speeches in full on television. The deal is: candidates get to broadcast their message if the press get to question them thoroughly. That's how real democracy works - give and take. What the Palin-McCain campaign wants is all give and no take: an indirect propaganda filter and the outrageous precedent of no press conferences in presidential campaigns. This is an assault on democracy. It is closer to Russian or Georgian democracy than American. If cable news continues to enable this chilling process, they will become complicit.
Enough.
I suggest everyone take the time to call and email the MSM networks to stop spreading Palin's propaganda read off teleprompters. Andrew Sullivan has a point. This really needs to stop. It's a matter of journalistic ethics. This is not how elections work in America. This is how elections work in Putin's Russia.
Just copy and paste the blockquote above if you're to lazy to make your own point. But make the point. Dont sit on your hands. This has never happened in our country's history, and we shouldn't sit complacently or cynically on our hands. 28 days. people. 28 days. And they're giving her a free platform to spew her hate. This really is North Korea. This is Putin's Russia. This is unacceptable.
Another Reason why we cant sit on our hands is for the safety of Obama's life, as NowandZen's Diary "They're Turning Into a Lynch Mob" points out. This is kinda how Bobby Kennedy got assassinated, but also Abraham Lincoln too. Loss of hope in economic turmoil, culture wars etc.
they're laying the groundwork for this. and the economic climate already has helped set the preconditions.
just remember that engineer in Tennessee who just lost his job and decided to gun down members of a liberal leaning church because he thought liberals were responsible for him losing his job. they found that the guy had hannity, o'reilly, and savage's books on his bookshelf.
fox news is ramping up the blame on minorities already.
Her Bile Bubbles Over
From WaPo ...
McCain had said that racially explosive attacks related to Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are off limits. But Palin told New York Times columnist Bill Kristol in an interview published Monday: "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more."
Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
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UPDATE:
Address this as well. Tell them to stop framing their stories this way. It only helps McCain, as it did Nixon in the same way. Nixon got the disgruntled pity vote against JFK. McCain might as well:
From a TPM reader
The media keep talking about how McCain's slide in the polls is "out of his control" because of the economic collapse (see Dana Milbank today for one example). That's silly, and sets people up to somehow feel sorry for poor, poor John McCain. His position in the polls is completely within his control, just as it is for Obama. If McCain actually had a plan on the economy outside of cutting taxes and FURTHER deregulation, if he focused on how to fix it every day, rather than on Bill Ayers and terrorists and Rev. Wright, if he talked about the issues that matter to most Americans, the polls might be trending in his favor.