Elitist Obama Bullshit
This story from Yahoo News about Barack Obama fighting perceptions of elitism is pretty much what’s wrong with the media today.
The story is all about Obama fighting the perception that he’s an elitist “after weeks of negative headlines,” including the infamous San Francisco “guns n’ God” speech and the flap about his pastor a few months ago that has for some reason resurfaced this week.
The problem, however, is that these stories were blown greatly out of proportion by the media in the first place. Why is Barack Obama responsible for what his pastor says when Hillary Clinton isn’t responsible for Geraldine Ferraro (who worked for her campaign) practically calling Obama the n-word? These are classic cases of the media blowing something out of proportion.
What makes it even worse is that they continue to report on it. This story is like the ultimate conflict of interest: the media reheating its own blown out of proportion stories, like some huge, pointless perpetual motion machine. There’s any news in this story; all of this stuff was reported weeks ago.
There are tons of reasons the media would do this (racism, etc.), but I think it comes down to profit, as everything ultimately does. Obama versus Clinton is good for ratings and subscription rates, and if one candidate wins it, there’s a huge source of news that is gone. That’s why they attacked Clinton when she was up and have now moved on to Obama.
Of course, classifying “the media” as one big, unfied, corporate evil is probably a stretch, but that’s a whole other post.
