In the past CNN has been very shallow and not very imformative. They really like to gloss over most subjects. All media really has gone in this direction. Their goal is to write as if their audiance is a bunch of 5th graders. This is not a joke, this is their real goal, they figure that if a 5th grader could read it then anyone could. Most magizines and newspapers do the same thing. Local news is also this way, specifically the morning local news.
CNBC is one bright exception to this rule, they are all about business and they talk directly to smart business people, but they also stay on topic so if it is not business related they say little about it.
Each of the two men running for office spends 1-2 hours of their day talking to the media and giving speeches. The media does not air this, instead they take a short snip and just pound that for an entire day. Most people don’t have access to the actual speeches, they must rely on the media and the media is doing a really bad job. The funny thing is that they MUST fill the airwaves with something so they have people debate about small parts of these speeches.
It is like everyone is talking about the good and bad parts of a movie, and the debate goes on for hours if the movie is good or bad, but they won’t just show the movie and let us decide. They want to make sure we decide the way they want us to decide if the movie is good or not. This is a huge disservice to the audience.
CNN has broken this trend recently. They now have started to air large parts of speeches and interviews, they then have someone come on and tell you if the facts stated are true or not, then they let the viewer decide. WOW….what a revolution….people can actually decide for themselves and not be told my the media how to think!
Today they had part of a speech where McCain was talking about his energy policy, and how he has an “All of the Above” policy, get the government out of the way of all types of energy and let the market go for it. This is very different to the plan that Bush has had, but Obama has been telling everyone that McCain is McSame, the same as Bush and he said the other day that McCain supported the bush plan. But here is where the kicker comes in, McCain voted Against the Bush plan and Obama voted for it! McCain hammered this, saying “Everyone know that if you vote for something you support it and if you vote against it you oppose it, so why is he saying I supported it when I obviously did not.” The fact checker came on and said that everything McCain said was correct. He went on to say that even Paris Hilton has a better energy plan than Obama.
To be fair they talked about how Obama was just mentioning Tire Pressure in response to a question, and this is NOT his energy policy. Some crazy republicans are telling people that this is the entire Obama plan which is not true. You can read his plan on his site, I linked to it from my Drill Drill Drill blog.
They went on playing videos back and forth for quite a while….it was really good to watch.