Good Morning America's only been on for about 10 minutes, and I'm already sick of listening to George Stephanopolous blather on about President Obama's poll numbers dropping. So what? Does this mean Barack won't be able to sit at the cool kids' table anymore? No doubt if the poll numbers were climbing it would make it easier for various pieces of legislation to make it through Congress, but dropping poll numbers at this point in a presidency isn't exactly unexpected. Every President enters the White House blessed with high approval numbers -- obviously. There's always a honeymoon period. Then the numbers inevitably drop as the public figures out that there isn't some magic switch in the Oval Office that the new guy can flip and instantly solve all our problems.
Gin and Tacos has an
interesting post up comparing Obama's numbers with St. Ronnie's -- the curves look very similar at the same points in time. One difference, though, one that we can all look back on with true longing: back in the Reagan era polling data was collected monthly, not on what appears to be the current practice of minute-by-minute, so the MSM wasn't able to obsess about trivia quite as much. Maybe the '80s weren't so horrible after all.
Seems it is either the President failing or Tiger cheating.. that's all the news there is anymore.. and I am really sick of both....lol
ReplyDeleteThey will do anything to disparage a Democrat.
ReplyDeleteThey will do anything to disparage a Democrat.
ReplyDeleteThere is little difference in the house of mirrors. I wouldn't be a Democrat anymore than I would be a Republican.
Anyway, no snow here and none expected for the next week. Looks like I'll be camping in the rain next week and not dealing with snow like I did last christmas.
Yahoooooo
Most media reports anymore are gossip, conjecture, opinion and titillation and I am sick of it, too.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's a seasonal ailment, but right now I'm unable to stomach regular TV news at all. I can only keep it down if it's been leavened with satire, a la "The Daily Show" or The Onion. It's a way of getting the news--which these days is almost always bad news--and washing it down with a sip of jest or mockery. I laugh in order to avoid crying.
ReplyDeleteWhat the regular TV news outlets offer is so plastic and pre-packaged, they might as well call it McInformation™. Especially on the morning shows, the news is over-processed to the point where any nutritional value has been drained out, so to speak. They dice the news into these teeny-tiny segments and then mold them into shapes they figure the public will recognize. Whether or not the true meaning of a story gets conveyed is an afterthought at best. The TV news people count on their audience to not think critically about what they're hearing, and the vast majority of them don't.
Derek, IIRC, there was a study done in 2008 that showed that people who relied on Jon Stewart and the Daily Show for news were better informed than people who watched "real" news programs. Not surprisingly, Fox News viewers had the most tenuous grasp on reality.
ReplyDeleteWhen we lived in upper Michigan, we could occasionally get the CBC station out of Thunder Bay to come in, and Canadian news was always an eye opener compared to the dreck the US networks were wasting air time on.