Sick of Cindy Sheehan?
We are. She’s the creation of a lazy media that’s looking for any excuse to keep Bush on the Iraq war hotseat, front and center, during the dog days of summer, when there’s little else happening and Bush is on vacation for frickin’ ever.
Still, there were apparently vigils held across the country for grieving Sheehan (and for needy TV news directors), whose son died in Iraq, including a candlelight vigil in broad daylight in downtown Ashvegas. Cherub Charu was there to tell us about it and talk to some weepy, hymn-humming war-haters.
The only problem was that Charu and her fellow WLOSers provided no balance to the story. Nothing to offer some context or another point of view.
Oh, I take that back. Charu happened upon a passerby, who refused to give her name, who took Bush’s side. Tha was it. Is that what you call “fair and balanced”?
Politricks
Inexplicably, the local teevee news continues to visit every Ashvegas City Council candidate’s kick-off party and fund-raiser. We don’t know why. But WLOSers need to study up – in a report about candidate Dwight Butner’s shindig, Scottie2Hottie ended by saying, “And Butner is running as a Democrat.”
Well, no. He’s not. Ashvegas City Council elections are nonpartisan. For you WLOSers, that means candidates don’t run under the banner of any political party. Pick up on it.
Grumpy Greeks
Ashvegas’ Greeks are grumpy about having to move their annual fall party to Martin Luther King Jr. Park because of construction at City-County Plaza. WLOS could have scored with this report by telling more about how the construction will impact all kinds of goings on at City-County Plaza, but they stuck with the angry Greeks. Can we say, “follow-up”?
For those who don’t know, City-County Plaza is going to be dramatically reshaped to include more green space, an ampitheater and such. It will be interesting to watch this project unfold.
Bring back the Punnyman
We never thought we’d be saying this, but we missed John “Punnyman” Le last night after being subjected to a filler report from some CNN reporter about how stuff developed for astronauts has helped us all out. It was basically a big ad for NASA.
We learned that everything from titanium golf clubs to scratchless lenses for glasses to running shoe technology was all developed first by NASA. Then Scottie2Hottie, in a rather femme moment, told us his favorite space-age invention was the Dustbuster. Too much information, Scottie.
A what-cast?
Cabana Boy Cuevas and company have been going overboard on coming up with cutesy names for the weather-guessing game they do each day. Instead of a weathercast, it has become a “futurecast” and a “funcast” and such.
So we thought we’d make some suggestions of our own, depending on who’s doing the weather:
hype-cast (Jay)
crapshoot-cast (Cuevas)
blunder-cast (Julie)
5 Comments
I agree… the Sheehan saga is without a doubt the “creation of a lazy media.” Then again, Crawford TX is a rather slow/no news town.
The New York Times offered a piece earlier this week that mentioned Bush has already met 900 families who have lost a soldier in the war (isn’t that half the war dead?). The press is lazy and Sheehan had her fifteen minutes… next topic.
Hallelujah Johanathan Swift! Preach on!
He’s right. The vigil was an event, a fact as it were. If a pro-war rally was going on, then that would be a fact as well. Otherwise you’re just talking about having a pro-war person opine on the event. That’s not news, it’s commentary.
And, for the love of Jeebus, the corporate media coverage in the run-up to this war was anything but balanced, it was a paean to the neocons.
I have to actually take up for Cuevas a bit – I like him. BUT…for some reason the LOS’ers don’t want to show the map in motion to show where the precipitation is going. I have even resorted to watching Cessarich because he consistently shows the path of precip. Then, I decided I was being to hard on Cuevas – maybe Sinclair opted for cheap weather equipment to hire a personality coach for Mark Hyman. But…alas…last night, there it was – the map in motion BRIEFLY before we got to see hard hard it was raining on a particular highway on the LOS zoom in. SPA puts it’s stupid Viper 7 logo right over our county – which is the one on the state line that is in the shape of a pork chop. Back to Cessarich, I ‘spose.
The story about the Sheehan vigil at Pack Square includes some fundamental misperception about what fairness in reporting entails.
(I don’t watch TV and didn’t see the WLOS coverage, which doubtless sucked.)
There are not two sides to a story about a vigil downtown. That was an event, and people attended that event for whatever reason. To offer the “other side” you’d have to interview people who claimed that the event didn’t take place.
As for the larger picture, the idea that any media source should be required to give equal time to each side of every story has created a media climate in this country that is laughable. Complete idiots are given equal weight and time vis-a-vis others with useful information and sometimes profound thought. As completely skewed as FOX is, at least they consistently present one side. (The “fair and balanced” tag, is, of course, a joke.)
In the particular case of Sheehan versus the president, the mainstream media have carried water for the Bush administration for years. If they are now devoting what might seem like excessive time to Sheehan, it is probably because many within the industry have just been waiting for a “star” to hang the anti-war story around — since that’s how they love to frame stories. In my view, they have a hell of a lot of catch-up to play before they come anywhere close to telling both sides of the story that landed us in an illegal war (according to international law) and violation of both U.S. and international law pertaining to prisoners, under a president who demonstrably lied to Congress, who’s administration officials have committed treason (Plame) and obstruction of justice, and who it now appears may have bribed Supreme Court nominee Roberts during his consideration of a case in which the Bush administration was a defendant.
Covering an opposing viewpoint to that of a president who could be impeached and has committed crimes without statute of limitation is kind of refreshing.
Give Wunder-woman a break. She’s only 16 years old.