Getting most of your news from the radio has it's advantages when you're a working mother. You can do it on your commute to and from work. You can turn it off when it's too depressing or offensive. You get a decent overview of "what's going on in the world". You don't expose young eyes and ears to material that they're not ready for yet. However.
You also only get the very top parts of the story. Take the Times McCain article as an example. All I heard about on the news were the allegations of romance between McCain and a lobbyist. But tonight I decided to take a look at the full article, and I was rather surprised. I must've been in an anti-news episode of my life when the Keating Five scandal broke, because it was news to me. I appreciated being able to catch up on all the various pieces of old news around McCain and lobbyists in the center sections of the article. I'm hoping for more articles like this, as the election comes around, pieces that help to give you some historical continuity on the candidates, and not just the sound bites that are current events.
But I had to smile at the McCain response posted at the end of the article, along the lines of Americans being tired of this kind of scandal reporting. Well, yes, and no.
News is all about conflict. If there's no conflict, it isn't "real news". On stations like NPR, pieces without conflict are trashed by listeners as info-tainment, or filler. Campaign reporting is no different. The piece has got to have conflict, or better yet, scandal. Sometimes I do get tired of all the negative stories, and I tune out, or switch over to KLOVE and let them tell me about some positive things happening in the world. But like most Americans, I expect the news to tell me what the campaigns aren't going to tell me.
The question is, what standard will the McCain campaign hold up when it's up against Obama? What will an Obama vs. McCain race look like? Will we see the gutter politics against Obama that the McCain camp protests at the end of the Times article? My bet is not. No, there will be some third party group playing that card, leaving McCain's image quite clean -- or at least clean enough to pass under the "above the fold" and "radio news" radar.
It's going to be a very interesting fall.
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