America Is Purple

Today, America lost a great voice for truth. Tim Russert has died of an apparent heart attack. While I am not often a fan of pundits and the media in general, I must admit I teared up at the news. Tim Russert was one of only a few in the media who are able to seemingly transcend bias. His fact checking and commitment to the truth are legendary. He was able to get to the questions that truly mattered and cut through the political buzz and static like no-one else in the business. Watching him during this current election cycle, he has always had something truly insightful to say whenever he was on screen. He was truly among the best in the media for holding politicians on all sides to account and while no one could ever truly fill his shoes I sincerely hope that others in the media will follow his example in reporting the truth, doing the research necessary to get the truth, and holding politicians to answer to the truth. He will be truly and deeply missed. America is the less for his passing. My prayers are with his family and friends.

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The mainstream media, and perhaps media in general, have been annoying me for years with their biases, blindness, fear mongering, and chasing after celebrity gossip at the expense of boring old fact-checking. Ostensibly, the media’s job is to watch the government and inform the people what the government is up to, to hold politicians to account, to check the facts of the issue and report them. They have not been doing that for a long time. The latest thing to cause me mental anguish has been their cynical reaction to Obama’s speech on Race. “Will this succeed in getting more voters for Obama?” they ask, “Was this enough to get people’s minds off the Reverend Wright scandal?” (Incidentally you can find a copy of the Reverend Wright’s sermon here. Not nearly as inflammatory in context isn’t it?) Once again, only the Daily Show with Jon Stewart got it right. “Today, at 11:00 on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race, as though they were adults.”

I can only imagine how frustrated I would be if I made a speech that personal, that honest, and that open only to have so many pundits treat it as a cynical ploy for more votes or worse. The carrion crows of political correctness circling and finding the one thing attackable: “Oh my god! He called his grandmother a ‘Typical White Woman’! He’s a racist!” Not only missing the point of the speech but going so far off the other end it falls into the realm of the ridiculous. It is stuff like this that really, really turns people off to politics. This is the reason that people are uninformed. This is the reason that people make up their minds based on looks and familiarity rather than substance. The mainstream media has replaced substance, fact, information, the lifeblood of democracy, with rampant speculation, innuendo, and the idiotic “analysis” of pundits who, in the interest of false objectiveness, have traded in their humanity for a lofty perch where they can pronounce unsubstantiated truths to us mere mortals.

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