Privately and publicly, Mr. Obama has articulated what he sees as two overarching problems: coverage that focuses on political winners and losers rather than substance; and a “false balance,” in which two opposing sides are given equal weight regardless of the facts.I'm pretty sure that's how, say, Stalin and Mao looked at it too.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Please Forgive the President. He's Having a Totalitarian Moment
From the NYT via Contentions:
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Well, as Stalin may have said--the quote is considered apocryphal by many historians--"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." Applied to Obama, we can easily tweak the quote to read, "It is enough that the people know that two opposing sides were given in a debate. The people who debate decide nothing. The people who decide on the proper balance of the coverage decide everything."
On a more serious note, what I find most frightening about Obama's "articulation" of the "problem" of political coverage is that he obviously thinks _his_ side is not sufficiently weighted favorably by the news media. A man who thinks like that isn't too far from assuming full control of the news media (though no doubt behind a suitable smokescreen of concern for fairness), if he can get away with it . . . and as his penchant for ruling by executive decree, often in the teeth of explicit laws to the contrary, with only the mealiest-mouthed opposition from Republicans, he might just be able to get away with it in a second Administration.
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