Yesterday the TV truth hit home as it never had before. CNN, Fox, MSNBC – they aren’t really news organizations, because what they peddle is mostly subjective fluff, not facts.
The West Virginia Democratic primary election is what drew me to this conclusion. It was something I already knew, but which hadn’t sunk deeply into my consciousness until I spent most of the afternoon working on some windows with the television tuned to CNN.
It was unbelievable how an endless stream of pundits, reporters, political hacks, and elected officials could take a few crumbs of new information and turn them into an three layer cake of supposition, frosted with a heavy topping of speculation.
Let’s see: last week, after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, the general cable news consensus was that Clinton was done for. Obama essentially had the nomination sewed up. The remaining six contests were just a matter of going through the motions.
Obama picked up a net gain of thirteen delegates on May 6. Then a bunch of superdelegates jumped onto the Obama bandwagon, putting him into the lead in that category also.
Polls predicted that West Virginia would be a Clinton blow-out. And that’s what happened. She won 20 delegates and Obama won eight.
But from a large share of the blather on CNN you would have thought that the Democratic presidential race had changed completely.
Oh my god! Exit polls showed that many Clinton voters wouldn’t support Obama in the general election! Poor, undereducated white voters in Appalachia weren’t voting for Obama! He’s doomed!
There was no new news presented, other than a confirmation via the actual results of what the pre-election polling had predicted. Yet the spin doctors, who, distressingly, included CNN anchors such as Wolf Blitzer, made a huge deal out of all this nothing.
The May 5 issue of Newsweek reported a new poll on how voters see Obama, Clinton, and McCain.
When asked “Which of the following presidential candidates shares your values?” 51% said that Obama did. Clinton got 49%, McCain 47%.
When asked “From what you know of the candidates, which of them, if any, do you think looks down on people like you?” 25% said that Obama did. Clinton got 32%, McCain 26%.
When Democrats were asked “Who do you think is most likely to defeat John McCain in the November election?” 46% said Obama and 38% said Clinton.
When Democrats were asked, “Who do you think best understands the problems and concerns of people like you?” 46% said Obama and 38% said Clinton.
Yet listening to CNN, I was told over and over that somehow the West Virginia primary showed that Obama has huge electability problems.
Well, with all those hours to fill before and after the election results filtered in, the cable news channels had to say something. So they just made stuff up, because reporting the actual results would have taken just a few minutes.
I’m a news junkie. But the overdose of punditology I imbibed yesterday may have permanently changed my desire to keep on getting my fix from television. On the Internet, at least, I can choose the blather I want to expose myself to.
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I ran into that on MSNBC also. They wanted to create a story and suddenly no states mattered as much as Kentucky and West Virginia. West Virginia was so important that without it, no president could win the election. Oregon, with more delegates at stake wasn’t even mentioned. They are journals is what they are. I think you do get news but not during the hours when the big name pundits are running it. I find internet newspapers to be better ways to get a few facts– something pundits have in short supply