Source: AntiWar.comJustin Raimondo
I was really looking forward
to the Republican foreign policy debate, eagerly anticipating the clash
I expected between Rep. Ron Paul’s anti-interventionist views and
the rest of that warmongering crowd – but I didn’t count on the
filtering tactics of CBS News. The televised debate went on for an hour,
but Ron only got 89 seconds to make the case for peace.
Paul’s supporters have consistently
claimed the Texas congressman is being deliberately ignored by the “mainstream”
media, and the amount of noise they’ve generated about this has been
the subject of more than a few self-justifying media self-analyses,
which usually conclude that, no, he’s getting what he deserves. Okay,
fine, that’s debatable, although I have my own opinion on the subject:
what isn’t debatable, however, is Paul’s rising level of support.
According to a recent Bloomberg
poll, among Republican voters in Iowa he’s currently in a four-way
dead heat, a single point behind frontrunner and serial sex maniac Herman
Cain. Among likely caucus voters who have already chosen a candidate,
however, Paul is way out front, at a stunning 35 percent, leading “frontrunner”
Mitt Romney by ten points. In financial terms, also, Paul is clearly
in the top tier: he’s raised more money in a single hour than Newt
Gingrich has managed to spend at Tiffany’s in a year, and spent more
in Iowa than any of the others.
The shortchanging of Paul at
the debate is inexplicable, in another sense, because giving him his
due would have made for some good television. The contrast between Paul’s
views and the rest of the pack would have provided more than a few dramatic
examples of pandering, demagoguery, and exhibitionist blood lust in
response to Paul’s provocative peace-mongering.
What we got, instead, was a
decidedly non-dramatic political advertisement for the media-anointed
“frontrunners” – Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and the supposedly “surging” Newt Gingrich. The lame-streamers don’t care about good
television – they just want to maintain their control of the process.
With the Internet cutting into their audience share, and the history
of the last decade or so cutting into their credibility, the mandarins
of the “mainstream” media are making their last stand on the battlefield
of presidential politics.
Media bias is ideological,
to a certain extent, but it’s also about economics. Sure, they’re
cheerleaders for the President, and have been ever since the Democratic
primaries of 2007-08. There’s a political motive behind giving the
buffoonish Rick Perry an inordinate amount of airtime, and creating
a media phenomenon out of the clueless Cain, and they aren’t
even bothering to hide it very well.
Yet it’s also about what
they’re selling, and I’m not just talking about the advertisements.
Remember, these are for-profit enterprises, not political entities;
and they’re media companies, which means their product is a narrative,
a story they’re telling their audience, which is hopefully buying
into it and tuning in for more.
