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Frank Rich noticed it too
I've written more than once about the state of the media, lamenting the mush and drivel and desertion of duty that is so prevalent. Frank Rich noticed it too and today he wrote about it.
All week long a media chorus had fretted whether he could pull off a potentially vainglorious stunt before 80,000 screaming fans. Well, yes he can, and so he did.
But was this a surprise? Hardly. No major Obama speech -- each breathlessly hyped in advance as do-or-die and as the "the most important of his career" -- has been a disaster; most have been triples or home runs, if not grand slams. What is most surprising is how astonished the press still is at each Groundhog Day's replay of the identical outcome. Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of this campaign and how it is perceived and presented by the mainstream media is now a major part of the year's story.
Frank goes on to outline how the Obama campaign was not taken in by this narrative but that the McCain campaign was.
The latest good luck for the Democrats is that the McCain campaign was just as bamboozled as the press by the false Hillary narrative. ... The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there's a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she's a woman. That's what happens when you listen to the TV news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
McCain is about to find out that Hillary supporters are not so stupid that they think any female will be a good substitute. They supported Hillary precisely because of her experience and strong stands on issues important to them. Nominating a woman will not blind them to the fact that she stands for the direct opposite of what Hillary fought and fights for on their behalf.
It is indicative of how Republicans run for office in general. Not with the good of the country in mind but focused how to manipulate the public so that they can maintain their grasp on power. Their goal is not a debate of ideas and issues that the country must confront and deal with but the development of a cult of personality.
Mr. Rich goes onto muse about why the press has lost its way.
Given the press's track record so far, there's no reason to believe that the bogus scenarios will stop now. The question of why this keeps happening is not easily answered. Ideological bias, unshakeable Clinton addiction and lingering McCain affection may not account for all or even most of it. Journalists are still Americans -- even if much of our audience doubts that -- and in this time of grave uncertainty about our nation's future we may simply be as discombobulated as everyone else.
We, too, are made anxious and fearful by hard economic times and the prospect of wrenching change. YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn't exist four years ago. Four years from now, it's entirely possible that some, even many, of the newspapers and magazines covering this campaign won't exist in their current form, if they exist at all. The Big Three network evening newscasts, and network news divisions as we now know them, may also be extinct by then. [...]
But now that media are being transformed at a speed comparable to the ever-doubling power of microchips, cable's ascendancy could also be as short-lived as, say, the reign of AOL. Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, "they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives." The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.
The Obama campaign has long been on board those digital locomotives. Its ability to tell its story under the radar of the mainstream press in part accounts for why the Obama surge has been so often underestimated. Even now we're uncertain of its size. The extraordinary TV viewership for Obama on Thursday night, larger than the Olympics opening ceremony, this year's Oscars or any "American Idol" finale, may only be a count of the horses. The Obama campaign's full reach online -- for viewers as well as fund-raising and organizational networking -- remains unknown.
None of this, any more than the success of Obama's acceptance speech, guarantees a Democratic victory. But what it does ensure is that all bets are off when it comes to predicting this race's outcome. Despite our repeated attempts to see this election through the prism of those of recent and not-so-recent memory, it keeps defying the templates. Last week's convention couldn't be turned into a replay of the 1960s no matter how hard the press tried to sell the die-hard Hillary supporters as reincarnations of past rebel factions, from the Dixiecrats to the antiwar left. Far from being a descendant of 1968, the 2008 Democratic gathering was the first in memory that actually kept promptly to its schedule and avoided ludicrous P.C. pandering to every constituency.
I think he nailed it right there. The media really hasn't a clue as to what's going on. This is a transformative election cycle and the transformation includes the traditional media. And they either don't know it or don't know what to do about it which is why they keep on bloviating about the CW and don't recognize that they make themselves look ever more irrelevant. I really like the way that Andrew Rasiej put it: "they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives."
Mr. Rich concludes with this:
As Obama said, this is a big election. We will only begin to confront the magnitude of our choice when and if we stop being distracted by small, let alone utterly fictitious, things.
It's true. But I have no hope that the traditional media will acknowledge his truth-telling anytime soon.
