Roundup

Published: 4/15/08 at 8:51 PM PST Section: Columns

Last night I was watching CSPAN (yes, insert nerd alert here) and I was absolutely appalled to find that the stalwart of boring political coverage (think British parliamentary live coverage) had been overtaken by YouTube.

I'm a big proponent of the populist political coverage that CNN, most visibly, and other network and cable shows have been pushing during this election season. It is an important attempt to return the government, and its accountability to its electorate, back to the hands of the people they represent.

However, at what point do journalists step in and say that perhaps a viewer or blogger is invalid? There is a reason that journalists are trained and paid for what they do. For every story you read, hours and hours of research have gone into every paragraph. We carefully compose each sentence for truth, importance and fairness.

So, how can a kid in a dorm room, whose opinion seems to be formed by a teenage desire to be different rather than be right, be allowed to put up a YouTube video on CSPAN and rant against the media in general for allegedly railroading Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee off the campaign trail?

Really? … No, really!? The media was so enamored of Mike Huckabee after he won the Iowa caucuses that they were virtually all but crowning him the second coming of the Republican party! And everyone loves Ron Paul. If nothing else, he certainly brings some interesting debate to the table.

I mean, he advocates the legalization of medical marijuana, which is certainly always an attention getter, and abolishing the personal income tax, which really gives him street cred.

No, the media is not responsible for the derailment of these campaigns. Paul only ever attracted a small, while fervent, fringe group of constituents. Most middle-of-theroad voters were turned off by his libertarian views and nearly all personal-freedom advocates were devastated by his Sanctity of Life Act, constructed to negate Roe vs. Wade.

Mike Huckabee was taken out by his own past mistakes, which included rumors that he had once verbalized an idea to put AIDS patients into their own colonies. His deeply held religious beliefs were also too right-of-center for most Republican voters, who seem to be seeking a more centrist viewpoint, which they found in John Mc- Cain.

Everyone has a right to their opinion, and certainly has a right to champion that belief, but perhaps it's time that in the networks' fevered search to reach out to audiences and keep their ratings up and their brand current, the established media organizations remember that their views and their reporting count for something.

Just because an idea exists does not mean it is invariably valid.

Next time I turn on CSPAN, I want live coverage, not an uninformed opinion recorded with little or no accountability to be held up to the world as a point that opponents must defend themselves against.

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