Media Meltdown

For the past month or so, I find myself home late and surfing around the various news channels. I jockey from CNN to Fox News to MSNBC just to take in all the viewpoints. At first, when I start hearing things that are untrue, I am immediately turned off and want to change the channel. But then, inexplicably, I am further drawn into it.

I sometimes wonder if anchors like Sean Hannity actually believe what they're saying 100% of the time. If they do, then they are dangerous to themselves and their viewers. If they don't, they are still, at the very least, dangerous to their viewers.

I could produce mounds of evidence to disprove nearly everything Sean Hannity says. It really is an awesome spectacle of lying. It's not even an art (unlike "spinning," the gold standard of lying), it's more like a brazen disregard in the face of the facts. If Hannity's house were on fire, he would invite you in for tea. He'd also have both his index fingers pointed straight in the air, in harmony, to further show you how committed he is to the lie. "Not on fire," he would say.

Hannity had Ann Coulter on last night...what's the point? They're seemingly the exact same person, and I can only imagine she was on to prove that they can be spotted in the same place at the same time.

And we had this big rehash of all the Joe Biden lies in the VP debate. Yep, Biden lied sure enough and the program did a pretty good job of pointing them out (of course, pointing out far more than any real fact-checking organization could find). But what about Sarah Palin, whom Hannity could not stop saying, "Just far and away the winner," or some such tripe. Palin lies a bunch, too, but never a word about it. I guess the embattled VP candidate has gotten enough criticism in the wake of her Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews (liberal media bias to blame, of course).

Since then, Palin, with the St. Louis arch prettily serving as a backdrop, said of those interviews, "Well, I just got annoyed, and I shouldn't have been so flippant with my remarks." And all the questions that she couldn't answer that have been replayed a hundred times? All is well, Conservative America, she's done her half-assed homework and has answers for you just in case your faith has been shaken. Now we're supposed to believe those answers have always been the answers, she just got annoyed a couple of times and didn't answer them in crucial situations.

Much like that whole McCain "fundamentals of the economy are strong" thing, which we are now supposed to understand, and always should have understood, and should feel sorry for McCain for having to explain, "Oh, the fundamentals McCain mentioned were the American worker." I was yelling at my XM Radio for Joe Biden to tear into that comment and expose it for the lie that it is, but he didn't, and moderator Gwen Ifell, who had (I believe in many ways, rightly) been accused of possibly having a conflict of interest considering that she has a book that features Barack Obama being released, oh, around the Presidential Inauguration, tried her best not to go on the attack, either.

In fact, these moderators apparently don't do their homework and aren't interested in catching these candidates in lies. And therefore, everyone in the audience is now dumber for having heard them. Last night I heard a question from Lou Dobbs, "Why don't these moderators point out the lies?" and unfortunately for the viewing audience, Dobbs didn't press this when no one answered, and furthermore he was probably making more of a statement than actually asking a question. This seems to happen far too often.

At one point, I nearly fell off my chair when Sean Hannity was talking about how the media doesn't delve into the real issues, and "has an agenda." He's crazy correct and hypocritical! I don't know how much stung my nervous system more: that he was right about something, or that he once again could demonstrate such a hypocritical remark without a trace of irony. And he's dedicating an entire hour of his next "Hannity's America" to delving into the issues surrounding Obama's shady friendships over the years. You see, this is not an agenda, he just happens to be dedicating all of his airspace to right-wing talking points without giving the other side any credence, while also not criticizing anything the right-wing does. Agenda? Hardly!

With the economy meltdown, the Congress going crazy passing this bill, the candidates lying about things and no one pressing them on it, the media saying "We're fair," with the same barefaced aplomb as the candidates, it's no wonder we're such a confused, listless, inable-to-act nation.