Why hasn't this become the national obsession that the Monica Lewinsky non-scandal became?
Why aren't Americans taking their President to task for breaking his promises (to say nothing of the law)?
Why have they put so much faith in someone so transparently dishonest?
Can anyone explain to me what has happened to the America I grew up in?
4 comments:
i don't know anything about the america you grew up in, but i am confident that a republican controlled congress and executive branch, and judiciary, are to blame for the present problem.
it fucking sucks.
hopefully, once the indictment comes through it will become a hot story.
hopefully the indictment will come through.
It isn't an obsession because Americans today have such short attention spans, because it isn't about sex, and because a hell of a lot of people in this country are too scared or apathetic to pay much attention. We've become a fascist state, and precious few have noticed.
But Katharine, how do you REALLY feel about it?!?!?!?!?
LOL...
Seriously, though, I've been fighting the "Americans have a short attention span" meme for as long as I can remember. It started back when I worked for the TODAY show, and Stever Friedman was the producer. "No segments longer than seven minutes" was the dictum. "The audience will lose interest." Just who the heck was he talking about? I remember (as a geeky, news obsessed kid) watching the TODAY program have interview segments that routinely ran 30 minutes. When Marshall McLuhan was on after the 1976 Presidential debate between Ford and Carter, they went about forty-five minutes.
It's the "lowest common denominator" syndrome that's at work--sacrificing the thinking part of the audience for the greatest number of "eyes"--and that, at the end of the day, is (at least part of) the problem with TV, AD 2005.
I agree with Katharine.
As long as there are movie stars out there cheating on their spouses, and otherwise reputable media outlets (print and broadcast) treat that kind of thing like "news", it's going to be hard to get people to pay serious attention to the things that really matter. (Clinton was an entertainer/President. Not only a politician, but someone whose personality and personal life people cared about. Thus, when the Rightwing chose to try and turn a little extramarital sex into an impeachable offense, people were interested.)
And as long as the Democrats continue to display their current...cowardice? Incompetence? Confusion? Reticence? I know know...but as long as those nominally "in charge" of the Democratic Party choose not to make an issue of what's starting to look like massive, organized fraud, no one else is going to do so.
The media is covering it...with increasing enthusiasm as they, at least, begin to glimpse possible implications, but for the Average Reader who isn't keeping a scorechart, it might not be easy to understand how all of these separate threads are beginning to intersect?
(I dislike this tiny comment window...I can't see all of what I've written and I can't tell if I'm being incoherent or not.)
Post a Comment