Blog
The Media, at it's Best and its Worst
by Jim Moore
This is not a poor reflection on Steve Sack, this is simply a baramoter showing how much our media goads the very worst out of our elected officials. Sen. Joe Lieberman had the audacity to support John McCain in the Presidential race (oftentimes going over the top in his rhetorical criticism of Barack Obama). As a result, the Democratic Caucus in the Senate wanted him to pay by stripping him of his membership in the caucus and stripping him from his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. President elect Obama, turning his rhetoric into action, called the Democratic Senate wolves off. In one of his first actions to show a change in management, Obama stood up to the vindictiveness and called for reconciliation. In doing so he robbed the media of their delicacy in reporting on a good fight. I'm sure Sack's cartoon of this expressed the disappointment of the entire Star Tribune newsroom.
Time and again, the media ignores reporting fundamental information on policy formation critical to our daily lives and instead chooses to focus on the soap opera sub plots. They behave like school children circling around a fistfight in the school hallway while ignoring the learning going on in the rest of the school. I'm not naive enough to think that they will change, I know it's human nature. But there always remains a part of me that hopes that there will be an adult in the room to lead us away from the frivilous toward the meaningful.
