Sunday, October 5, 2008

Grow a pair.

(Cute graphic, but where's the substance? Photo courtesy of abcnews.com)

Whether you watched to see a Palin trainwreck or a legendary Biden gaffe, the debate has come and gone. And it raked in the highest ratings for any Vice Presidential debate in history, besting the Bush Senior-Ferraro debate by nearly 15 million viewers.

While most analysts in the media agree that Biden won the debate, it appears Palin might come out on top by, well, putting her words in the right order...most of the time. New polls are due out on Tuesday.

But why aren't analysts talking more about misstatements by the candidates, particularly Biden's, a few of which he repeated numerous times? The McCain camp issued a press release calling out 14 of Biden's 'lies' (their word, not mine). Jim Geraghty puts the number at 24. On the flip side, the Obama camp released their own fact-check of the debate.

From Biden falsely asserting, more than once, that Obama never said he would sit down with the Iranian president (come on), to Palin's misrepresentations of Obama's voting record on taxes (he raised some, he cut some), viewers were stuck listening to a bunch of spin, ad nauseam.

While I'm aware this is typical debate warfare, can't the media at least try to right the wrongs of the candidates, with deep research and a vested interest in truth-telling? Don't just write a little article with a cute graphic, buried under a bunch of other links. Be a little more motivated to be the watchdogs we need you to be. Call these candidates liars, philanderers and deceitful. Odds are, most of them are anyway.

2 comments:

M. Dery said...

Keith, you're letting your cynicism, which assumes a priori that every candidate's every utterance is freeze-dried bullshit (you concede as much in your kicker), cloud your vision, I think. You argue that the MSM isn't truth-squadding the candidates, then link to a CBS article that you dismiss as "little" yet impressed me as fairly substantive for a Web-friendly story. (News sites aren't THE NEW YORKER; most readers just hit and run, and prefer their news in quick-fit snippets.) More to the point, it's simply not accurate to suggest that no one is calling B.S. The gang over at factcheck.org all over these debates like ugly on an ape.

M. Dery said...

My duh: "quick fit" should have been "quick fix. And the "is" is missing from my final sentence. More of those increasingly frequent Senior Moments!