Friday, April 29, 2011

"Premature Ecalculation"

Over the past quarter century or so, journalists, particularly television journalists, have gotten very good at finding excuses for covering sensationalistic non-news stories. Thirty or forty years ago Donald Trump's campaign would have merited about as much coverage as Pat Paulsen's. Now the reporters (eyes bleary with crocodile tears) insist that they don't want to provide a national platform for someone who is probably just in it for the publicity to make provably false claims with racist overtones. It's true that freak shows like Trump bring in the ratings and the consequently the ad revenue, but reporters like Meredith Vieira assure us that they're only giving this airtime because the polls show that he's a 'serious candidate.'

As is usually the case with journalistic hypocrisy, the best rebuttal comes from the Daily Show.

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