MEDIA VOTES, KERRY WINS
by David Sisler
The side-show barkers of days gone by hyped their wares – bearded ladies, two headed dogs, the elastic man – and then shouted to the assembled crowd, “You ain’t seen nothing yet! Step right up, folks. Only one thin dime. A tenth of a dollar!”
Well, the Democratic Party’s convention is over and the Republicans are just around the corner, so keep your wives and children locked up. It still isn’t safe to come out.
Now, I’m not disparaging conventions and I’m certainly not disparaging the Republicans who will once again nominate President George W. Bush, but by the time the media gets finished with the Grand Old Party, they may not be recognizable. And, of course, according to THEM, we shouldn’t even waste our time voting because Mr. Kerry can’t be beaten.
After the Dems broke up in Boston a couple of polls touted almost double digit leads for Mr. Kerry. But now the USAToday-CNN-Gallup Poll finds that President Bush actually gained 4 percentage points over the weekend. So, whom do you trust?
John Kerry says he is running on his record, but the only record he is talking about is the one from 1969 when he was a soldier in Vietnam for four months. His decades of disservice in the U.S. Senate are not even mentioned from the campaign floor. If I had a record of continually voting against what the majority of Americans believe in – when I bothered to show up and vote – I wouldn’t want to talk about it either.
Howard Dean (why do I keep wanting to type John “Watergate” Dean when I place my fingers on the home keys) got all teary-eyed when he talked about a college student in Pennsylvania who sold her bicycle and gave the $100 to his campaign saying, “I sold my bicycle for democracy.” As Mark Steyn remarked in the Chicago Sun-Times, John Kerry should have sold his bicycle. Then the party would have gained $8,000 in its saddle bags.
But all of this campaigning and conventioning is a needless exercise. Let’s just let the media vote and it will all be over. You see, the Media Research Center, which has tracked media bias since 1987, recently reported that if only journalists had voted there would have been no Republican presidents during the last 40 years.
Studying such top news organizations as ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and Newsweek, they found that journalists’ support for Democratic candidates rarely fell below 80 percent.
When Ronald Reagan won by a landslide in 1984, only 24 percent of newspaper journalists voted for President Reagan.
Michael Dukakis got 76 percent in 1988 and Bill Clinton received more than 91 percent in 1992. If you remember, in 1992, only 43 percent of all U.S. voters picked Bill Clinton. And that was, of course, only the 40 percent of registered voters who went to the polls. So while the media elite were almost unanimous in picking Mr. Clinton, only 16 percent of the rest of us did so. Are you surprised then, when you read the left-facing slant of today’s newspapers and view the same tilt on television to learn that only 17 percent of all journalists identify themselves as conservatives?
Evan Thomas, the assistant managing editor of Newsweek (hardly a conservative publication) came clean over the weekend. Mr. Thomas said, the media “wants Kerry to win” and so “they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic.” His own magazine calls John Edwards, “The Boyish Wonder,” and gushes about the Kerry-Edwards ticket, “Their energy was infectious.” So, there you go.
Maybe the tone of this election can best be seen in Joan Abbey’s obituary which appeared in the Miami Herald. Ms. Abbey died on the first day of the Democratic National Convention and was buried the day after it ended. Her death notice said, “You can honor Joan’s values by voting against George Bush and contributing to a liberal or Democratic cause.”
Mark Steyn sums up that “a condescending media congratulat[es] a condescending leadership for effectively communicating to their condescending activists their plans for everyone else.”
Maybe this year Dan Rather will announce that the Dems have won on November 1. This will be one for the books. Isn’t that right, Mr. Dewey?
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Copyright 2004 by David Sisler. All Rights Reserved.
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