The Mainstream Media Continues to Fail America...
By Brad Friedman on 6/24/2005, 1:40pm PT  

Another notable item from HuffingtonPost this week (where they've recently removed BRAD BLOG from their blogroll for reasons unknown to us, but probably known to Scoop@HuffingtonPost.com), this time from Alex Keyssar, a Professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Keyssar was in Chicago a week or so ago for a Rainbow/PUSH conference where Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) spoke about his Right to Vote amendment to the U.S. Constitution, otherwise known as H.R. 28 and currently co-sponsored by 55 other House Members. That's right, you have no constitutional right to vote in this country...just in case you didn't realize it.

In covering the event where Jackson and Howard Dean spoke on the proposed constitutional amendment, Keyssar had the following observation pinpointing precisely where it is that the Mainstream Corporate Media in this country is failing America...

The point here is that some significant news was made at that event in Chicago on June 12: Howard Dean, chair of the DNC, endorsed the right to vote amendment sponsored by Congressman Jackson. This is not a small development: Dean is a key political figure, and nothing is more fundamental to American political institutions than the right to vote.

One might have thought, thus, that Dean's public endorsement would get some attention in the press, particularly since numerous reporters were in attendance. But at the press conference that followed the event, reporters displayed little interest in (or knowledge of) the right to vote amendment --- although they had just spent two hours in a room where it was the sole subject of discussion. A room where hundreds of people, many of them African-American, seemed to enthusiastically welcome the prospect of an amendment that would guarantee their right to vote.

Instead, the reporters' questions focused obsessively on the comments that Dean had made a few days earlier disparaging some Republicans. What the press wanted to cover was not an important substantive issue but a spitting contest between political personalities: e.g. would Dean respond to criticism that vice president Cheney had voiced that morning? Even worse, they seemed more interested in promoting the spitting contest --- by asking questions designed to continue it --- than in sorting out an issue for their readers. Not a single question was asked about the meaning or significance of the amendment itself.

And so it goes. Nothing new there. Just a reminder of what most BRAD BLOG readers know all too well already.

If only a young blonde white girl had introduced a Right to Vote amendment in America before being kidnapped! Perhaps then the Mainstream Corporate Media would have decided such an issue was worth letting Americans know about. The abysmal record of the MSM continues...

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