Media Distortion and Misogynistic Tendencies

I listen to news on the radio for the better part of my workday. Then when I go home I tune into the network newscasts, and I sometimes catch the morning talk/news programs before I head out the door. I primarily tune into those television programs in order to see how they are distorting the news of the hour.

Every piece of media news is a distortion; but the television programs really have to twist and compact a given story in order first to fit it into an allotted 3-5 minute segment, and second to lend the story a sense of drama and entertainment value.

Two stories cycling through the media have caught my eye recently, and I’d like to take this opportunity to share my thoughts on them.

The first is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “outburst.” Clinton is in the middle of a massive tour of Africa. This is a historic venture, and she is traveling to some of the most war-torn and dangerous regions in the world. While she was fielding questions in East Congo, a question was mistranslated but essentially it seemed that Clinton was being asked how her husband, Bill Clinton, felt about a certain issue. Clinton was visibly perturbed by the question and responded that she was the Secretary of State, not her husband, and that she would give her opinion and not his.

That’s it – this is the “story” that has been run on every major, and many of the smaller internet and independent radio, news program. Now I don’t know about you, but it isn’t news to me that Hillary Clinton is a tough person who can occasionally have a temper. She is a politician at the highest level of the game – is she supposed to play nice all the time? I get sick of this nonsense. Not withstanding the fact that the question was apparently mistranslated, it is fundamentally misogynistic, and Clinton had every right to be angered by it.

But aside from all that – is this really a story worthy of major media attention? It is over-shadowing the whole reason Clinton was even in the region, and that is to highlight the rampant sexual violence being perpetrated against women and children in the Congo – sometimes this despicable behavior is being carried out by government forces.

The second story is the anger and outrage boiling to the surface at various town hall meetings throughout the United States. Of course, as far as I can tell this outrage consists of about a half-dozen episodes caught on video that are being played on endless loop. Even in a 3 minute news story, the networks are running footage of the same episode 2 or 3 times.

Don’t get me wrong, there definitely is outrage out there – people are scared and confused. The government has had to act fast, and that naturally scares people. It scares me. The last time the government acted this fast was after 911 when the Patriot Act was rammed through – of course no one made a peep back then because we were all cowed by the fear of terrorists. But the media is latched onto these handful of outburst and are trying desperately to turn them into a real story. Senator Clare McCaskill of Missouri was on the Today Show this morning being interviewed by Ann Curry. McCaskill astutely pointed out that the one violent outburst that occurred during her recent town-hall meeting overshadowed the other 2 hours of healthy, rigorous debate that went on – that questions were asked and answered and that the meeting was actually, in her opinion, very productive. That didn’t satisfy Curry, who brusquely moved past McCaskill’s optimistic statement and ended the interview saying “that must have been very hard for you” in reference to people booing and being rude to the Senator.

Once again, I think Senator Claire McCaskill can take it. She is a powerful politician who has fought tooth and nail to attain the position she has. Curry’s “poor little woman” tone offended me. She didn’t ask a single question about the health-care plan being debated – the story has just become about a bunch of misinformed, talk-show driven yokels who think that by yelling at the top of their lungs they can obfuscate the issues and steer the train off the rails.

And I’ll be damned if it doesn’t seem like the bastards might be right.

madbob@madbob.com