Catching MSM in the act… of being informative!?!
I am shocked.
Lugging my way from the gate to baggage claim tonight, I glanced up at TV screen showing CNN. I expected to see, well, crap.
I still remember the first time I sat down and turned on the news after four years of an MSM-less collegiate bubble. The stories, the petty political issues, were the same as they were when I was in high school. A feature on gays in the military? What, did they just pop in a video from 1999? Oy.
But back to my shock.
CNN was doing a piece on political attack ads. And not just a two-minute fluff piece– they took a historical perspective, interviewing Dukakis about what he learned from the attack that tanked his campaign, they talked about the extreme things pamphleteers used to write in Jefferson’s time, and they showed Lyndon Johnson’s infamous “daisy ad”. They talked to people who orchestrated attack ads for each party, talked about video editing techniques (use slow-mo and a black and white zoom in on someone’s face to make them look sinister), talked about how the internet was changing the playing field (Republican spin expert laments “We used to have message control, total message control– now it’s the wild west”) and showed examples of ads from the current campaigns.
I mean, it’s still just covering tactics and strategies, not (heaven forbid) the merit of actual issues in the campaign, but mygod, it was like they’d had this crazy notion that journalism could involve in-depth coverage of something that actually _informs the public_.
I hope they slip in more substance before the person responsible is tracked down and fired.
