4 August 2000

Playing with:  the new webcam.

Callie and I met up with John, Don, and a few other people at the Icehouse tonight (which was in fine form -- surprisingly slow for a Friday night, but with Callie's dad and the hotdog production at full speed, and a pleasant group of people) and there was quite a bit of conversation about the Republican National Convention.  We all seemed to agree that it went well for the Republicans, and that they had done an outstanding job.

I found some excellent commentary on the convention in Paul Gigot's and Peggy Noonan's weekly columns at OpinionJournal.com.  But most telling was this excerpt illustrating a phenomenon I've written about often, the idiocy of the media.  Like Noonan, I don't want to harp on a media bias, but it's there.  Most journalists are liberals and are idiots, and it shows in their coverage.  It's a sad state of affairs that Noonan actually has to call this person she writes about heroic simply because he did his job:

And indeed our friends in the media were so desperate to use those words--it's as if they packed them in the briefcase next to the laptop, and have to throw it out now lest an unused epithet weigh down their bag on the way home--that they actually called Dick Cheney's speech "red meat."

Dick Cheney's speech was critical, in a mild and rather reserved way, of eight years of Clinton-Gore. He was critical because he is in politics, and politics is an argument in which you assert and defend. He was making a political speech in which he asserted that the Clinton-Gore administration has, in many ways, been lacking.

Some red meat. Today, Thursday, reporters were calling it an example of negative campaigning. I sit back and wonder: Do they know how silly they sound?

Let me tell you of an unknown hero, a very smart and professional young producer/researcher at MSNBC. He was watching Mr. Cheney's speech and picking up the media buzz, and he thought, as an intelligent man would, that the reporters were way off base. He remembered Al Gore's acceptance speech at the '92 convention, in which he accused Bush-Quayle of causing "decay," of creating a "crisis of the spirit," of having left millions of Americans "betrayed by a government out of touch with our values and beholden to the privileged few,: of having "nourished and appeased tyrannies"; "they have embarrassed our nation"; "they have demeaned our democracy"; "the American people are disgusted."

And that's just in the first page.

Finding and handing out copies of Mr. Gore's speech quickly dampened the growing media fervor regarding Mr. Cheney's supposed slash-and-burn tactics. I think the researcher turned around a whole media river that night, or at least redirected it.

I don't remember that the Gore speech--which truly was red meat, and, more than that, was quite vicious and extreme--was called any of those things. I think I remember it was called strong and passionate.

Really it is babyish to decry the massive and monolithic, unthinking and sly liberal political bias of the elite American media. It is not new; it is a fact of our lives; but I must say, every four years it jumps out at you like a child in the bushes on Halloween, making its ooh-ooh sounds and flapping its arms beneath the ghost costume. It has an endless power to startle you, and make you suck in your breath. . . .

Excerpted from Peggy Noonan, "A Breakthrough Convention:  The GOP is inclusive--and that reality shone through the media fog," OpinionJournal.com

I want to think that the internet, and C-Span, and DSS technology, and technology in general have made the biased slant -- whatever the bias -- of news reporting less relevant today than ever.  But I'm not so sure about that.  I know it's made it easier for me, and other intelligent people who can think for themselves, to read speeches and analyze events and draw our own conclusion, but I wonder if most Americans aren't still too lazy to do that, that it isn't easier for them listen to idiots like Peter Jennings mispronounce Condoleezza Rice's first name and then really massacre the substance of what is being said.  It's almost like the media is incredulous that anyone could actually believe that individuals should be empowered and government, particularly the national government, should be less intrusive, let alone that a governing majority exists of people who think this very uncomplicated thought!  So we shall see.  I think one major appeal of Bush is that he comes across as a fairly simple man, a man who could be your neighbor, who'd rather be at your barbecue than at a policy wonk discussion of EPA emissions testing.  That persona will serve him well when the media turns on him -- as it inevitably will when it sees Gore trailing -- and he has to get his message to the people himself, a la Ronald Reagan.