Monkeywrenching the political process

[unixronin]

With the popular vote in the just-past election so close, one could be forgiven for wondering how much the election may have been influenced by what amounts to an elaborate practical joke.

Of course, the article points out that the perpetrators observed that the news media could easily have exposed their hoax had they put the least effort into checking their facts.  But in this last election, by all appearances the media didn't WANT to check their facts, as long as the report involved something damaging to the McCain-Palin campaign.  Can you imagine the witch-hunt had Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish chosen Barack Obama as their target?  Ah, but wait, we don't have to imagine — we have the persecution of Joe the Plumber as an example.

When I consider how one-sided the reporting of this past election campaign was, and yet how close the popular vote was, I find it hard to avoid speculating that in this Presidential election, the people of the United States did not elect Barack Obama; the news media did.

Comments

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

While there is some complaint about the amount of coverage, that's pretty easy to explain away by the contested democratic primary and the fact that Obama was The New Thing.

This isn't what people are complaining about. We had more in depth digging into Joe the Plumber during this 2 weeks on the scene than anyone bothered with about Obama. You can at least point out that the digging into Palin was justified by her being the VP candidate, but it's hard to figure why a similar effort into Obama wasn't in the works months ago.