what happened to the war and the economy?

The current Democratic race has got me seriously depressed. Two of the best candidates the Dems have had in years have become two of the candidates I'm most sick of hearing about because of the media's insistence on focusing on bullshit - I had to turn last week's debate off.

What are we talking about in the media now? the War? the Economy? of course not. The number one topic being covered by TV news in this campaign is the Jeremiah Wright controversy and believe me, I'm happy it broke now instead of in October, can you imagine?, but for God's sake, can we talk about the war again!?!

and can some one out there in the national news media PLEASE COVER the fact that

a. the Democrats don't have a realistic exit strategy out of Iraq (if they do, please e-mail it to me: tyler.jcksn@gmail.com)

and that

b. no one has a good and realistic economic plan?

who covers this? is there any journalist out there who has the expertise to cover what's happening in the economy and ask the candidates tough questions about what they're going to do when it goes belly up?

No, there isn't.

And for a guy like myself, a self-proclaimed and frustrated Bob Woodward wannabe, working in the local TV news is like being a state Senator when you wanna play with the big boys in DC -

all we ever get to cover at WTEN is the next great medical discovery, a shooting in a neighborhood only an idiot in this city would be stupid enough to go to and yet another Amber alert.

Bernstein

Like most male journalists, I'm more of a Woodward man than I am a Bernstein man - I mean, would you rather be Robert Redford, or Dustin Hoffman? but anyway, here's Bernstein on TV news:

Carl Bernstein said on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer": "I think that the real trends in journalism in the past 30 years have been toward gossip, sensationalism, manufactured controversy, and at the same time as we're doing the dumbing down of most American journalism to the point where we're losing most of our context, then you have these great newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, that are doing better reporting in many ways than they ever have." BOB WOODWARD'S BEEF: "There is a lot of good journalism, but the environment is, 'Hey, that's on CNN. My God, let's go chase it.'" (PBS NewsHour)

lurid storytelling and just how sick of my job I really really am

I'm on assignment right now in Philadelphia, I'm not going to bore you with WHY I'm in Philly and what the story is I'm working on, suffice to say, it's tedious enough to make me cry and with the anxiety of waiting to hear if I'm going to get promoted, I'm having a hard time focusing on my job.

But anyway, yesterday, I had a break between a meeting and an interview and just enough time to get lunch and hang out in my room at the Double Tree and I'm flipping channels, not thinking about anything, watching some Keith Olberman on MSNBC and there's a commercial and I end up flipping to the Jerry Springer show ... remember him?

He's still around.

And he's done away with his "guests" sitting in chairs, what's the point, really? people run out and bash each other from the get-go, why pretend you're going to have a civilized conversation when what's most entertaining is to bash the person who disagrees with you in the face as hard as you can? and now they have puppets, yes, strange little Muppet-like puppets that comment on the action and cheering people in super hero costumes who stand around and watch and also, a human torso! yes, that's right, a human torso! that's not really involved with anything, he just scuttles around the stage ...

It reminded me of my profession - news as the carnival freak show in the American entertainment circus, a series of booths where pedophiles and astronauts in diapers rule the air and there's no analysis of why anything happens. God, I sound bitter I know, but when you're sent to Philadelphia to cover a story as stupid as the one I'm covering right now I don't see any reason to NOT be bitter ...

I wish I had more to say, but I'm hungry and the fine city of Philadelphia beckons ... ugh.

the perfect news story ... ?

I don't know about you, but I don't think I'd go so far as to push someone to suicide to prove a point, OR get a good news story ...

check it

more on this topic later, but for now, read this - especially if you're watching WTEN every night.

http://www.esquire.com/features/predator

I have SexyBack stuck in my head ...

because one of my co-workers is totally obsessed with it - it's drivin' me nuts!

but that's beside the point.

the point is - I don't feel I have a political ax to grind, or I didn't. I don' think of myself as that political even, I didn't vote until 2000 and I was in my thirties - but there are some people who can't divorce their politics from their work ...

the station has become OBSESSED with this one story, we're running it over and over and over again and the story itself, yeah, it's a good story it should be told but the frequency and the fervency at which we're running it? and I know we're really doing it because the people I work for have their own ax to grind - don't let anyone tell you there's such a thing as a "liberal media," the media's too stupid to coordinate itself well enough to lean left or right, or choose the center.

We media folks report whatever stupid thing we happen to be consumed with on a given news day ...