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Originally Posted by tambourine-man
Seriously, who gives-a-fuck?
There's a thousand legitimate questions that President Bush should be answering - and he should be being asked them by a focused, serious media... But instead of asking them, we're stuck with this ridiculous circus act, where the questions are somehow ignored, in favour of 'continued coverage' of the baloney "David v Goliath" story that the news networks love to jerk off to, knowing that it can be drawn out over the course of a couple of weeks without actually tackling the reasons for the action. Of course she's being manipulated by 'the left'... of course it's a bullshit set-up! What did Sheehan or anyone else expect?
Cindy Sheehan can eat the dirt that the Presidential motorcade flicks up in her face. I dislike this populistic method of critique at the best of times (purely because it falls so easily into the hands of the info-tainment departments of every news channel) but when the detailed lies and abuses of power of Government are boiled down to a single issue of a protesters argument... ugh... no thankyou.
In such turbulent times, we need upstanding journalists who are prepared to grill politicians and ask questions that may lead to them being barred from press rooms. We need thorough, sober and hard-nosed critique, not another performing seal that will just add to the superficial bullshit of 'news coverage'.
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a fair point, t-man, and well put, as always
the fact is that 80% of the mileage that this story has gotten is because Cindy Sheehan is staging this protest in Crawford, Texas, in front of an army of media who have nowhere to go as long as the Prez is there and absolutely nothing else to report on. if she had done this anywhere else, the story would have come and gone by now. from a strictly pr point of view, one could say it was a very clever move on her part - guaranteed coverage.
that being said, if her little circus keeps the hard questions about the war on the front page and in the mind of the public, then this event, political theater though it may be, will have done some good. without question, the press has been asleep for years, but populist eruptions of sentiment can blow open doors that the press is not comfortable opening on thier own. if it takes a performing seal to get their attention, so be it. whatever it takes.