As Obama continues to expand his lead in current polls on the state of the presidential race, corporate media outlets are putting on display exquisite contortions of logic in order to try to keep Romney competitive in the race. Today's howler: CNN. Below the twisted orange pretzel of inanity for more.
Today CNN's website features an opinion piece titled "Can Romney get back on track?" by Larry Sabato. In the article Sabato aims to answer the question
Could smart decisions, combined with a few favorable circumstances, propel Romney to an upset victory?
Sabato sees the upcoming debates as presenting one chance for Romney to make a comeback, but of key importance for Romney's hopes is this:
Romney has another advantage. He might benefit from the news media's desire for drama. Even though Republicans see the news media, on the whole, as biased toward Obama, most journalists aren't keen on a cut-and-dried presidential contest.
Now why would be "news media" give an undue advantage to Romney?
For ratings purposes, if nothing else, they want a close, competitive race where the momentum goes back and forth.
That's a good point, Larry Sabato. No doubt the news media provides space to foolish commentators who would try to show drama and the illusion of a close race. But unfortunately, Sabato doesn't provide us with actual examples of such hacks in the news media. So to help him out, I looked around online today and found an absolutely perfect example of somebody writing a wretched hack piece for the news media to make the race seem to have more drama and competitiveness than it actually does.
At one popular news media site called the Cable News Network I found an essay by one Prof. L.J. Sabato, who pens this pathetic and desperate sounding paragraph:
To win against the rising odds, Romney and his team have to exceed expectations in many ways and run the near-perfect campaign that has eluded them so far. That's very hard to achieve, but American electoral history is dotted with astonishing comebacks that defied the predictions of experts. It is not impossible that 2012 could record yet another.
Well, Larry Sabato, you are correct, and there is no shortage of foolish and self-serving and self-unaware hacks out there who will write any old nonsense to prop up the news media's narrative of a dramatic presidential race. And the writer of that horrible horse-race promoting article ought to be ashamed of himself. Bravo.