Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
I hate watching election news on TV or reading it in certain publications. It makes me angry. In a futile quest to make elections interesting, the drummed up fake balance reporting is in fact hurting our democracy.
From Media Matters:
One thing that grinds my gears every election season is the lack of effort from the members of the national journalist class. Basically most of them turn into stenographers – just repeating what political people tell them. Robin Roberts, a morning show host who thinks she is a journalist, knows what her job should be but misses the point of what it is suppose to do.
Summer repeats of TV shows are a nice time to come across things like an interview with Good Morning America host Robin Roberts on the Ellen DeGeneres show from back in February. She is asked about the 2016 Presidential election:
I simply had enough. Most days I scan the Letters-to-the-Editor section of my local paper, shake my head, and move on. But last week, I reached my breaking point. I don’t care how mentally unstable you sound, if you can’t even get basic history right, I have to call you on it. That’s why I responded to a recent letter I read. In politics, you can’t always let things slide.
I am NOT a Hillary Clinton fan, I supported Bernie during the primaries, so what set me off about Wayne B.’s letter to the editor on August 4th? He mangles history. THAT pissed me off.
Everyone expects some political lying in TV ads during election season especially with all the dark money pouring into campaigns. A recent ad that supports Senator Rob Portman is the worse kind of political lying because it is aimed at the low information voter who doesn’t keep up on the issues. A small business owner is complaining about insurance costs and then Portman chimes in that “Obamacare” has cost jobs and is vague as usual that it needs to be replaced. The fact is the business owner’s insurance costs went up because they couldn’t offer the cheap, crappy coverage no longer permitted under the Affordable Care Act and there is no evidence that the ACA has cost any jobs.
Here is a brief transcript of the ad:
The Ohio Auditor of State David Yost participated in a hearing of the US House Agriculture Committee on July 6th. As I wrote in a previous post, Yost presented his ‘evidence’ of ‘fraud’ from an audit his office conducted on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka Food Stamps) in Ohio. It was obvious Yost missed the real issue with the ‘fraud’ he found and he then used his appearance in DC to raise money for a future higher office campaign.
For his testimony at the House Committee on Agriculture hearing, which was titled: “Past, Present, and Future of SNAP: Understanding Error Rates and Fraud“, David Yost wrote: