Three cheers for Frank Rich

Finally.

Someone is cutting through the BS media coddling of John McCain.

Frank Rich's column this week is a must read:

TEN years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience with a crude sexual joke about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when a supporter asked him on camera, “How do we beat the bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just loves the women.

Awesome.

Finally, someone in the traditional media is pointing out the absurdity of McCain's supposed appeal to Hillary's supporters.  Please read the entire article.  It is essential reading.

You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.

But while the McCain campaign apparently believes that women are easy marks for its latent feminist cross-dressing, a reality check suggests that most women can instantly identify any man who’s hitting on them for selfish ends. New polls show Mr. Obama opening up a huge lead among female voters — beating Mr. McCain by 13 percentage points in the Gallup and Rasmussen polls and by 19 points in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey.

Frank Rich makes a key point that I have felt for a while: that the media purposely stokes divisions in the Democratic Party based on race and gender in order to gin up ratings and to help John McCain.  

As example, he points out something I noticed this week as well: NBC Nightly News's coverage of the NBC/WSJ journal poll was focused on Obama's shortcomings despite the fact that Obama has a six point lead and doing well with women, blue collar voters, hispanics, etc.  It was as if they were trying to turn up into down, as Al Gore would say, just to portray Obama in a negative light.

This is the key passage in Rich's column because it gets to the heart of the media's motivation:

That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.

So, to summarize:

1. The media is in the tank for John McCain

2. The media is twisting facts to fit their Woe-is-Obama narrative du jour.

3. Ratings, not the truth, are driving the content of coverage.

I cannot stress how important these points are because the corporate media disinformation campaign is to repeat the meme that Obama is darling to the media but divisive to the races and genders in a cynical attempt to help John McCain, the true media darling.   This is how the media convinced 2/3 of the public that Saddam had WMD - simple repetition unburdened with analysis - and this is how they plan to take down Barack Obama.

I think that Obama's small but significant lead at this point means that the corporate media will have one big target on Obama's back the entire election.  Just look at the overhyped coverage of Jim Johnson this week while McCain is allowed to associate with dirtbags like Charlie Black with impunity.   There is a huge double standard here.  

I think the fact the media is constantly navel gazing about whether they are too nice to Obama is a cynical attempt to hurt Obama.  .  I think that the media has been biased against Obama and that most people do not evaluate media bias correctly, overemphasizing the influence of a few loudmouth pundits and ignoring the insidious effects of sustained false narratives in "straight news" reporting.

So three cheers to Frank Rich for pointing out the truth.  I have little confidence that the rest of the media will heed his words.  They have corporate masters to serve, not the American people.  We are going to have to work hard to cut though the BS and hopefully speed the well-deserved obsolescence of the traditional corporate media.