Last night I watched the John McCain show. I happened to watch it on a PBS channel, mainly because the picture quality was far better than what Comcast gives me for C-Span. Even seeing the speeches on PBS, I was reminded why I have gravitated towards C-SPAN for viewing conventions and State of the Union addresses in recent years.
PBS did not have any annoying crawls across the bottom of the screen. They did however have a cast of characters who felt the need to tell me what was about to be said, what just had been said, what it meant, what I should think about what I had just seen and heard, and how this all relates to the much larger picture of doing whatever it takes to get Barack Obama elected as the savior of the United States and all humanity.
CNN and FOX crank that nonsense up a bit further. With their endless crawls across the bottom of the screen and constant flicker of graphics placed just below the speaker, viewers are subjected to reiteration, interpretation and overt political commentary while the speech is still in progress.
Anyone who is going to rely on Wolf Blitzer, Brit Hume, Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson to tell them what to think and who to vote for really shouldn't be involved in the electoral process. Or the gene pool for that matter.
As an informed voter, I do not require my news to be interpreted or presented, I simply ask that it be reported. Provide me with access to the facts, and I will evaluate those facts and arrive at my own conclusions. Presenting the viewer with a conclusion and then supporting that conclusion with only selected, non-contradictory facts is not reporting it is editorializing.
Strangely, these same people criticize and dismiss as irrelevant all the moronic Dittoheads for receiving their daily briefing from the puppet master and then acting in lockstep accordance with Rush Limbaugh. Worse, they truly don't seem to recognize a parallel between the two situations.
News ought not be a matter of Right and Left, or even of Right and Wrong, even when that news is alleged coverage of political events. News simply is. Deliver the facts, as many as possible from all possible viewpoints. Put that news channel on television, put that philosophy into a daily newspaper, and I will be among the first to watch or activate my subscription.
C-SPAN comes closest, though when they open the phone lines at the end of any covered event, the calls they take and commentary they make quickly reveals a discernible bias on their part as well.
No matter how hard we try, Heaven will clearly never be a place on Earth.
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