I just sent an email with the following text to MSNBC. It's only changed here by the addition of a YouTube, and some formatting.
Subject line:I've had it - the TV is off
I've been a TV addict since I was a little tyke. I almost always keep the thing on. MSNBC is my default station throughout the day, even if can only tolerate Pat Buchanan in small doses, and don't like how Joe Scarborough bullies Meka. There's other stuff I could complain about, too. However, generally, there's enough of value in the balance for me to keep it on. But before I started this e-mail, I turned the television OFF. It'll go back on for Countdown, but I've had it with the rest.
Honestly! This wall-to-wall faux outrage over Reverend Wright is just too much. We have real problems afoot these days. A few examples:
Record home foreclosures
Plummeting dollar, massive trade deficits
Record oil prices
Record food prices
Record numbers of people without access to health care
Rapidly increasing high school dropout rates (somehow, we seem to be leaving children behind, despite the NewSpeak slogan to the contrary)
Record costs for college education
Massive hemorrhaging of jobs overseas (with both economic & security implications)
Elephant in the room: That little military misadventure in Iraq
Your own airwaves polluted by war mongering jingoism from paid Pentagon shills (though I can see where you'd want to avoid casting yourselves in an unfavorable light by reporting on that)
Hillary Clinton & John McCain both wanting to "bomb bomb bomb - bomb bomb Iran"
Those terrorists watching us destroy ourselves from their mountain stronghold in the Hindu Kush (Why would they need to attack again? The damage from 9/11 continues to mount without them lifting a finger.)
Global warming/climate change (my personal top issue for over 20 years now)
Folding, spindling and mutilating the Constitution and its legal foundations all the way back to the Magna Carta, plus ignoring treaty obligations regarding torture (and other things)
I could go on. But you are the "news" experts, so I'm hardly telling you anything you shouldn't know full well. I'm in New Mexico now, but took a degree at City College in Harlem some years ago (a great school, and I was at the Natural History Museum, too, also a great place. But I digress). Anyhow, I've taken the A train up to Harlem innumerable times. Drawing on those years of experience, I believe that tearing this retired urban pastor to shreds stinks of incitement to racial strife. And you are stoking the flames.
FWIW, I think that John Kerry was mainly "swiftboated" by y'all, not by Houston money man Bob Perry and the so-called "Swiftboaters for Truth". You're the ones who led with the story hour after hour, day after day after day, giving them millions upon millions worth of free airtime. And you're doing the exact same thing now.
Here's an example of a story you could cover - one I read in the 4/18/08 issue of Science (p. 303). The Bush Administration is cutting up to 75% of USAID's funding for agricultural research stations around the world. The agency is being directed to prioritize health issues instead. It wasn't a lot of money for international agricultural research anyhow - $56 million in 2006. If we're spending $8 billion a month in Iraq these days, that's FIVE frickin' HOURS of war cost. There's food riots breaking out around the world now, and climate/weather patterns are changing. Defunding the breeding, propagation and dissemination strains of staple foods that can maybe survive these challenging, changing conditions is not exactly "cutting fat". Rather, it's more like aiding and abetting mass starvation. Why don't you look it up, and give some of those people a little air time? In other words, do something useful!!
Please re-read those last two paragraphs. And please could you try and get a tiny minuscule wee bit of perspective about what matters and what doesn't? (And no, I don't object to levity. Laughter is good medicine. Oddball is fine...)
When this Rev. Wright story "broke", my immediate gut instinct was that it would inevitably escalate into larger scale racial animosity. Through "exposing" the ways of the black church. I am not pleased to be right about this. I think Reverend Wright is exactly right about this: It's an attack on black churches in general, and cannot help but sow more of that kind of division. Shame on you for doing that! It is not what anyone needs in these days of overblown polarization in the face of massive common problems (Sen. Inhofe notwithstanding). While I'm on the topic: You might want to review some of the speeches of the hallowed Martin Luther King. He was a lot more harsh a critic of America than you care to remember. His condemnation of the Vietnam War could just as easily apply to the misadventure in Iraq today.
I assume that anyone reading this email at MSNBC makes enough money that you aren't in desperate straits these days. But a lot of people are. I live in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the nation (also one of the most gorgeous as it happens. In other words, rich in other ways). Anyhow, the "difficulty" of these times is hard to miss. I resent the hell out of the media - YOU - pumping up this piffling, trivial (pardon my "French") shit. There's real problems in the world. Are you - reputedly in the "news" business - oblivious to all of it?
I have my own personal version of today's headlines. I have an orchard to tend to, and a shoulder that's acting up. So, how do I get the physical labor done that's needed? Will that cortisone shot get me through the minimal requirements to keep things irrigated? And how do I pay for needed medical treatment? That $2000 deductible might not mean much to the likes of you, but it's a massive obstacle for me. I don't worry so much about Wall Street bears and bulls - it's bears getting into the apple crop, or the neighbors cows getting through the fence that worry me. Thank goodness the car's only 8 years old and still has a few years of life left in it. And yet, I'm in better shape than a lot of others I know. (New York isn't the only place with eight million stories! Or Washington...)
How dare you talk about whether anybody is "in touch" with the regular folks in America? Like you have a clue! And, besides that (back to the good Reverend) - how sweet would you come out smelling if a multitude of people combed through every corner of your life and did a mash-up of your very worst moments condensed into a minute or so, then broadcast it to the world over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. For the express purpose of kneecapping someone associated with you. It's deeply and fundamentally wrong. 322 reiterations of this non-story are plenty enough for me. George Stephanopoulos (another network, I know) actually asked "Who loves America more...?" And this morning some reporter asked Rev. Wright about how regular Obama's church attendance is. You've gotta be kidding! (That's precisely why the TV is now off.)
And so, except for Countdown, you've officially lost me as a viewer. At least for now. Until you get onto some kind of news I can actually use. Because this is beyond ridiculous.
Note: I'm gonna post this on Daily Kos, too. I'm not famous like Mr. Olbermann, so sometimes my posts get noticed, and often they don't. We'll see if this modest little rant catches any attention. It's a very geeky subset who follow the state-by-state selection of add-on superdelegates, though some of my other topics do better. I like it when Chuck Todd is on-air getting "technical". And there's other stuff you have covered that I like, too. But this? I can't bear it one more minute.
Addendum for Daily Kos: Thank goodness for the hope embodied in the peach blossoms. Now if the weather will be kind and spare us from hard frost for the next week or so?
