Media Criticism

I have watched all 20 of the Democratic debates so you can understand my frustration with the course of events. I remember watching the first debate with everyone from Joe Biden to Mike Gravel competing for air time well before anyone would expect the campaign season to start. The entire Democratic field was invited to these events when few people were watching. As the campaign season began to crank up for voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, people began to drop off due to prior commitments and network rules about viability.

Tuesday’s MSNBC debate in Ohio was a fitting conclusion for the long grind of the Democratic primary season. I know that there are other primaries after next Tuesday with Pennsylvania a big fish in Democratic circles. This was my last debate until there are Democratic and Republican nominees because I have reached maximum capacity for rhetoric.

We have heard both candidates put through the grinder with MSNBC covering the presidential election 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (unless a celebrity does something). I don’t know if I can hear Chris Matthews tell another story or make a piss-poor joke. Joe Scaroborough is intolerable as a debate analyst and I won’t get too deep into my disdain for Tim Russert and Brian Williams as moderators. One of the reasons why I won’t be watching more primary debates is the spectacle made of the democratic process made by cable networks.

The main reason that I tire of these debates and hope that this was the last one is that they serve no purpose. Candidates aren’t going to answer questions that are omitted by moderators and the networks aren’t interested in getting down to issues. We fight the same fights constantly in these primary debates including the “who’s tougher�? debates in the Republican primary and the “who can get out of Iraq quickly�? debates in the Democratic primary. The writers are back so I can watch some terrible sitcoms and dramas instead of watching poorly-scripted debates.

I have grown to appreciate Pat Buchanan as a commentator in recent years. I definitely do not agree with his stance on illegal immigration and super-small government that is incapable of helping out the neediest among us. Buchanan has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq and is the surprising voice of reason in many conversations in his role as an MSNBC commentator. The Columbia Journalism Review has an online article regarding Buchanan’s success as the lone fact checker in recent election coverage on MSNBC.

The tiff between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has relied heavily on taking things out of context. Senator Clinton and her vice presidential candidate/husband have done what Republicans have done so successfully over the last decade: pick apart sentences and parse bill language without context. Obama can be accused of increasing the racial aspects of the presidential campaign and occasionally taking pieces of Clinton’s past out of context. While MSNBC host Amy Robach and producers were content to facilitate the perpetuation of unfounded arguments with sound bites, Buchanan’s attempt to place the arguments of both sides into context was a breath of fresh air.

Media consumers across the country are getting tired of “truth squads�? within campaigns as well as “fact check�? sessions on news networks. The words “truth�? and “fact�? mean nothing in national campaigns as candidates frame issues to bend objective information into something palatable to a slim majority. The two solutions to the problem of facts and truth on the campaign trail have their faults. A boycott of networks like MSNBC would be great though there are bits of insight from people like Buchanan in the expanse of garbage spewed by Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson. The other option is to continue the flood of blogs, podcasts and online videos devoted to picking apart individual claims by politicians. I like the idea behind democratizing political fact checking but I am not convinced that the same biases that pervade political campaigns won’t pop up in citizen fact checking.

After a year of active campaigning and endless hours spent on my part watching stump speeches, we have finally reached the end of the Iowa caucuses. The lesson I learned from the 2008 Iowa caucuses was that I should have paced my excitement about politics of change. The Iowa caucuses, after all, represent a few hundred thousand individuals who were able to convince one another to side with a few top tier candidates. I have little energy left for New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and beyond.

MSNBC and CNN have assisted in this political fatigue. I turned on MSNBC this morning and there was a caucus ticker with nearly 10 hours left until the first caucuses started. My addiction to coverage of presidential politics led me to watch talking heads like Joe Scarborough, Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews speak at length about the same topics for half a day. Aside from siding with Pat Buchanan on his projection of the caucus results, I got little out of this all-day coverage.

There was a beacon of hope in media coverage about the Iowa caucuses. I know dozens of people watch C-SPAN on a daily basis but I have to believe a greater number who were interested in the caucuses watched this evening. The C-SPAN coverage began in earnest at 6:00pm Central time with a live feed of coverage by one of Iowa’s local stations. I watched a bit of the coverage of an Iowa Democratic caucus as well as the straightforward polling process on the Republican side. There weren’t aging commentators telling me what to think like the other networks. If you ever want a raw feed into politics, check out C-SPAN.

My last thought on the Iowa primaries is that these results may not matter by next Tuesday. Mike Huckabee will find it difficult to win in New Hampshire. Barack Obama has done well in New Hampshire but you better believe Clinton and Edwards will be doing a full court press to challenge him at every turn. The mainstream media may think that Obama has the overwhelming momentum and the surprising turn of Huckabee’s campaign make the next few primaries a foregone conclusion. I think that this race goes until February 5th and beyond because the momentum from one primary to the next may seem overwhelming but voters have had eight years of George W. Bush. People in the Super Tuesday states want to kick the tires a bit before they make their selection.

I have been a fan of fringe candidates since I witnessed Ross Perot’s Quixotic campaign for president in 1992. I was only 12 at the time but I watched Perot’s TV ads and his role in the debates as something interesting. It would take something interesting to get a 12 year old involved in politics especially with a stiff like George H.W. Bush campaigning. Mike Gravel brings the same type of energy to the Democratic primary process for the 2008 election. Unfortunately, the honesty that separates him exposes his weaknesses as a presidential candidate.

The MSNBC debate on Wednesday, September 26 was one of the dozens of debates that will take place between members of the Democratic field. Mike Gravel answered a question regarding problems with his personal finances with a diatribe against credit card companies. I love his anger and enthusiasm in the same way that I enjoy Larry David’s character on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Gravel and David are funny and some small part of me wants to share in their brutally awkward manner but I don’t want to have a conversation with either one of them.

There was little chance of Mike Gravel winning the nomination before Wednesday night but his answer to credit card companies may have sealed his fate. Americans are tired of high debt but many realize that they are stuck due to their own actions. Gravel has been relatively irrelevant in politics since he left the Senate in 1980 and Democrats are looking to strike while the iron is hot in 2008. If Mr. Gravel ever reads this, I would invite him for a beer if he ever comes through Wisconsin but he will not get my vote during the presidential primary (whenever it ends up being).