While the right-wing media dutifully executed its role at the VRWC's PR firm for yesterday's teabagging, the left-wing media spent its time haughtily chuckling at the obvious astroturfing, the inevitable typos on rally signs, and etc.
The traditional media simply sat back and let both sides make competing claims, without ever checking the facts themselves, as is their custom.
Nothing of value was gained by anyone. And so it goes- just another day in our barren media landscape.
Exactly one media outlet provided honest-to-god fair and balanced coverage of yesterday's protests.
"But wait!" you might say, "isn't Democracy Now! part of the left-wing media?", and on any other day I might agree with you, but today Amy Goodman's program featured reporting on the teabagging that was objective in the best and truest sense, for all these reasons-
- It totally ignored the meta-squabble about whether or not the whole thing was astroturfed.
- It put the protests in their proper context, reporting on them with no more emphasis than they were due.
- It included interviews with level-headed individuals that could explain coherently what they were protesting.
- It included reporting on left-wing anti-tax protests not covered anywhere else in the media.
And after the thirty seconds they spent on tax day protests, they moved on to things that are actually important.
They covered the second day of protest in Afghanistan against the legalized rape law. They had an interview with the original domestic surveillance whistleblower. They interviewed Richard Armitage and asked him tough questions about the torture regime.
And I'll bet that as juicy as the results of that last interview were, Politico still won't run it as a headline.
Democracy Now! is the single best news program available in English, period, and unlike our favorite partisan outlets, they refuse to contribute to the self-referential circus of bullshit that is most of the American news media.
I include MSNBC in that- Keith and Rachel revel in the same tabloidism and braindead nonsense that the rest of the media does, although it's less pronounced on the Rachel Maddow show.
We might get a kick out of watching them tear down our enemies, but they're not really helping to improve the tone.
Watching an actual news program that is at once serious, thoughtful, non-partisan, free from corporate influence, and reported from a progressive perspective is extremely refreshing. If you've never seen it, today is a great day to check it out.
http://www.democracynow.org