Good lord, after the hatchet job that had everyone hounding Howard Dean and questioning his sanity, it turns out that it was actually doctored audio. The sound you heard on the clip that was run 700 times post-Iowa was from the noise-filtering handheld microphone. He was screaming to be heard over this very loud crowd, which is why he got louder and louder, but the handheld, which is used for just such purposes, filtered most of that out. So, minus the context of the crowd noise increasing as he talks, you have what we saw on TV, a guy getting louder and louder and more boisterous. In the room, you saw a guy playing to the crowd. All this would have been different if they had used ambient audio that accurately reflected what was going on, but that wouldn’t have been salacious enough.
I have an ever building disgust of Big Media news. Despite the fact that we now have more news choices than ever, I watch less news lately than I have in the last few years. We don’t turn on Fox News ever in this house, rarely watch CNBC or MSNBC or CNN and less and less do I even want to watch Headline News. Things like this are the reason. I flat out distrust them in motivation of what they choose to report, and now even in execution of what they report. To be blunt, the news they report is frequently turning out to be misrepresentations or flat out lies.
I feel that Big Media News let us all down in the softball coverage of our buildup to war in Iraq, being too cowardly to even ask the obvious question of “Do we really need to do this?” I feel they failed us with the kissyface reportage of the “embedded reporters” during the war. They are failing us now with their reportage of the Democratic primary, which is pretty much serial character assassination. In 2000, Gore was the brunt of the character question, even when Bush and Cheney were laughing on hot mikes about a print reporter being a “major league asshole.” I expect nothing but the same this time out, and even as the Big Media will do an unwarranted evisceration of whichever Democrat gets the nomination, bullshit artist reactionary pundits will talk about the “liberal media” as it reports nothing but right wing stories, with a right wing slant to the benefit of conservatives everywhere. This is life with Big Media. Welcome to the machine.
