Blagnet.net

Democracy disgraced

After the debate in Philadelphia between Obama and Hillary, ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson were widely and harshly criticized for the way they ran the debate; specifically, the questions they spent the first 45 minutes on. Viewers, writers, and Obama’s camp complained that voters did not hear anything terribly important or relevant to the candidates’ suitability as president until well into the debate. The first three questions asked were about Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s claim that Americans were bitter and turned to guns or religion as issues they could affect more than others; and Hillary’s lies about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia.

Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, wrote an open letter to Gibson and Stephanopoulos on his blag that conveyed the anger, exasperation, and shame that he felt towards the two TV journalists. I mean, he was almost beside himself because of the way a “debate” between two State-loving socialists, who have strikingly similar opinions about how all of us should be governed, was conducted.

He says the debate was “a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, ‘a shameful night for the U.S. media.’” Some more excerpts:

I am still angry at what I just witnessed, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking.

…your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods….

You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues—trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn’t enough space—and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited—to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans’ benefits to improving education. …

What I just watched was an outrage. As a journalist, you appeared to confirm all of the worst qualities that cause people to hold our profession in such low esteem….

My answers to those criticisms would be drastically different from those of Gibson or Stephanopoulos or virtually any other journalist, to whom Bunch directed his letter (it was really to journalists at large, not just to Gibson and Stephanopoulos), but I’ll write them here anyway. The reason it is pointless to ask the same two candidates the same old questions about the housing market, gas prices, education, gun control, taxes, and all the other things you mentioned, is that their answers are the same and they aren’t changing any time soon! “More government intervention in this industry, more government intrusion into this aspect of your daily lives.” More, more, more government is all they ever propose, all we ever hear, and all the voters want! Bunch and the rest of this country are fooling themselves to think it matters whose new New Deal is inflicted upon us. Statists might claim the devil is in the details, but I contend that the details of the form that our socialist punishment takes are inconsequential in the long run and probably in the short run.

The reasons the American people hold journalists in such low esteem are a mystery to me, but the reasons I hold you in such low esteem are: Most TV journalists are more concerned with who is going to win and why than with what is right and why; most radio show hosts simply spout biases, falsehoods, and vitriol that will increase ratings; print journalists think that examining an issue closely consists of covering both Democrat and Republican sides of the issue (!); and most journalists in general are either too scared or too stupid to ask politicians really tough questions that drive to the heart of the matter, such as how income taxes can be justified at all in a “free” society, how they can justify the existence of the Department of Education when it has failed so badly, why they continue to support an oppressive war on drug users when it has failed so miserably and resulted in the enslavement, rape, and murder of millions of innocent Americans, how a sane person could associate foreign wars with “defending our freedom” when increases in governmental activity and income-theft always come along with wars, and whether maybe it should be pretty obvious that a criminal justice system that is granted a legal monopoly and extra-societal status is going to accrue an unacceptable number of mistakes and abuses without any corrective action or recourse for the victims.

That is why I have such a low estimation of TV, radio, and newspaper journalists. If I had been so desperate for blagging material that I felt like watching a single second of a debate between those two frightening, power-hungry, megalomaniacal, State-worshiping socialists, then Gibson’s and Stephanopoulos’s performance would have been unlikely to lower my opinion of journalists any further.

Bunch’s open letter also said,

By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

Speaking of promoting democracy, the Dalai Lama, in his recent speech at the University of Michigan, said,

I am not against the Olympic Games. From the beginning I have expressed concern about individuals, human rights, religious freedom, in this case in the Republic of China. I’m fully committed to democracy.

de·moc·ra·cy (dĭ-mŏk´-rə-sē)— n. Mob rule.

Maybe when stupid Philadelphia journalists and enlightened spiritual leaders talk of “democracy,” what they mean is self-rule or self-governance. Somehow I don’t think they mean Might Makes Right or rule-by-others-you-vehemently-oppose-who-were-elected-by-people-other-than-you. That would be the opposite of self-governance. I know it’s easy to get one political concept and its complete polar opposite mixed up—I did for many years, when I was a child who went to government schools—but democracy is not self-rule or self-governance. Unless you think the only relevant political entity is the society at large, in which case there is no hope for you. I don’t think Bunch, most voters, or any of my non-libertarian readers think that. I just wish they would see that what I want for myself is more important than what they want for myself.

Two ABC journalists did not disgrace democracy. Democracy disgraces itself every day by giving us governance that is neither free nor voluntary.

Posted in Democracy, Elections, Media, Philosophy