Some days after looking through the main newspapers in the country and many blogs, I feel very depressed and not very sanguine about the future of our country. The total vacuity of the articles, the lack of important information, the ridiculous interest in what the candidates for the presidency do, whether Obama likes arugula or Clinton had a shot of whisky is demoralizing. When people are unable to go to the doctor because they don’t have insurance and cannot afford it, or many youngsters are going to be unable to further their studies, or we don’t know how to stop a war we entered insouciantly only to cause so many deaths of American youth and Iraqi people, we are behaving a little like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome was burning.
So it was with almost with unbelief but also enjoyment that I read in the New York Times the article written by Elizabeth Edwards, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and wife of the former senator from North Carolina John Edwards. She was writing about what has been disturbing me so much lately, the poor quality of the information the media was offering to the American people about the elections. She deserves to get our thanks for bringing to light something so important for the country. The title of the article itself said it all:
Bowling 1, Health Care 0
In it she stated “I’m not the only one who noticed this shallow news coverage. A report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy found that during the early months of the 2008 presidential campaign, 63 percent of the campaign stories focused on political strategy while only 15 percent discussed the candidates’ ideas and proposals.” And further on she continued “News is different from other programming on television or other content in print. It is essential to an informed electorate. And an informed electorate is essential to freedom itself. But as long as corporations to which news gathering is not the primary source of income or expertise get to decide what information about the candidates “sells,” we are not functioning as well as we could if we had the engaged, skeptical press we deserve.” Yes, as Elizabeth Edwards finishes her article, we should calmly but firmly tell the media “Do your job, so we can — as voters — do ours.”
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