Shoddy! Tawdry! Televised Train Wreck ABC - Frank Rich

[otohara]

“THE crowd is turning on me,” said Charles Gibson, the ABC anchor, when the audience jeered him in the final moments of Wednesday night’s face-off between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

I can’t remember a debate in which the only memorable moment was the audience’s heckling of a moderator. Then again, I can’t remember a debate that became such an instant national gag, earning reviews more appropriate to a slasher movie like “Prom Night” than a civic event held in Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center:

“Shoddy, despicable!” — The Washington Post

“A tawdry affair!” — The Boston Globe

“A televised train wreck!” — The Philadelphia Daily News

And those were the polite ones. Let’s not even go to the blogosphere.

Of course, Obama fans were angry because of the barrage of McCarthyesque guilt-by-association charges against their candidate, portraying him as a fellow traveler of bomb-throwing, America-hating, flag-denigrating terrorists. The debate’s co-moderator, George Stephanopoulos, second to no journalist in his firsthand knowledge of the Clinton White House, could have easily rectified the imbalance. All he had to do was draw on his expertise to ask similar questions about Bill Clinton’s check-bearing business and foundation associates circling a potential new Clinton administration. He did not.

But viewers of all political persuasions were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we’re losing in Afghanistan. Those minutes were devoted not just to recycling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bosnian sniper fire and another lame question about a possible “dream ticket” but to the unseemly number of intrusive commercials and network promos that prompted the jeering at the end. The trashiest ads often bumped directly into an ABC announcer’s periodic recitations of quotations from the Constitution. Such defacing of American values is to be expected, I guess, from a network whose debate moderators refuse to wear flag pins.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/opinion/20rich.html?hp

[tsuki]

1. The Moderators were not wearing the Flag Pin? Serious stuff.

Someone should ask them why they hate America.

:sarcasm:

[Submariner]

2. It's all about the quick, cheap, gotcha moments

No thinking skills required.

Almost 8 years along, there should be a few Woodward & Bernstein-like Watergate-like (and much worse) blockbuster stories revealing all the criminality of the Bush junta. Where's the missing $12 billion in Iraq, why no armor, wire-tapping , invasion of privacy, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

Nah...give me an update on **cking flag pins. Something I've noticed worn mostly by the draft dodgers and chickenhawks who never served a minute in uniform.

[Sequoia]

11. I think I'd like to wear a French flag pin myself.

Just to piss everyone off of course, and then tell them we would be flying the Union Jack if not for them. Viva la France!

[SeattleGirl]

3. "Hello! My name is Charlie!" "And my name is George!"

"And we're Right Wing Whores!"

[Skittles]

4. that debate was absolute proof of that

it was DISGUSTING :puke:

[mwb970]

5. A great article from Rich, as always. /nt

[lisa58]

6. great stuff....

...this line is priceless:

When a Washington doyenne like Mary Matalin, freighted with jewelry, starts railing about elitists on “Meet the Press,” as she did last Sunday, it’s pure farce.

[pacalo]

7. "Freighted" with jewelry -- hahaaa! Good one!

[bronxiteforever]

8. People wonder how our country started a war for no good reason,depends on a communist country

for major financing, devalues its currency, cuts taxes while spending on two wars billions of dollars a month, let a major american city drown and endorsed torture.

It is because we pick leaders in the "ABC" fashion. Historians will won't have to go far to understand. The flag pin debate is the emblem of a failed country.

[Miss Authoritiva]

10. Wow...

You got everything condensed into four sentences. And not only do "we pick leaders in the 'ABC' fashion," once they're in we keep re-electing them until death or criminal convictions intervene.

[Jade Fox]

9. "media-populace disconnect".....good phrase....

This is quite interesting too:

"Not the least of the reasons that the Beltway has gotten so much wrong this year is that it believes that 2008 is still 1988. It sees the country in its own image — static — instead of as a dynamic society whose culture and demographics are changing by the day.

In this one-size-fits-all analysis, Mr. Obama must be the new Dukakis, sure to be rejected by white guys easily manipulated by Lee Atwater-style campaigns exploiting race and class. But some voters who lived through 1988 have changed, and quite a few others are dead."

I think the "moderate" wing of the Democratic Party still thinks it's 1988 too. They're behaving much like Rich describes the media.