Politics is a dirty game. It always has been and it always will be. The fact is, things really haven't changed much, but we have a hard time seeing that. The game has not changed but what has changed is the COVERAGE of the game. What the heck am I talking about?...let me try to explain.
Bill Clinton messed around in the White House with an intern and got impeached over it (albeit, not convicted). This happened in the 1990's...too bad for Bill Clinton. If it had happened 25 or 30 years earlier, we would have NEVER EVEN HEARD ABOUT IT! Unfortunately for Bill, he took office in the age of the 24 hour a day cable news coverage era. His little "faux pas" (and subsequent denial of the event) is plastered all over our TV screens by the news, pundits, and late night comedians non-stop for months and it nearly ruined, and certainly tainted, his legacy
George Bush got Congress to approve a war with Iraq by using information that proves to be "iffy" at best. Over the next several years, the news organizations, pundits, and comedians had a field day with President Bush and eventually drove him out of office as a laughing stock.
The fact is, lots of Presidents have screwed around in the White House over the years, the press just looked the other way. Lots of people knew about it, but it never hit the airwaves. Never once did Walter Cronkite report about Jack Kennedy getting a bit of nookie. That kind of thing just was NOT reported.
Another fact is, and this often gets overlooked (but I am a history teacher, I know things), wars are NEVER POPULAR! There have always been plenty of people who have thought that our reasons for going to war were questionable at best, or dubious at worst. Name any war America has ever fought and I will assure you that a HUGE chunk of our nation's population at the time were dead set against it. There were no shortage of Loyalists (Torries) in the Revolutionary War. Even WWII (after Pearl Harbor), people were climbing out of the woodwork claiming that FDR (who also had plenty of affairs, by the way) had baited Japan into attacking us by placing them under the oil embargo.
The difference is, we now live in an age where we are bombarded with several 24 hour a day news networks trying to stay afloat in the ratings war. There are no taboos anymore when reporting news.
What's more, each news network has a line up of political commentators, many of whom are far out to the left or right on the political spectrum. Their job is to say sensational things to rally the nuts who are that far out with them, and worse, to infuriate the nuts on the other far end.
All this leads us to a world which we perceive to be going to hell in a handbasket, when in reality, we have really always been in the handbasket, CNN just wasn't there to cover it.
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Welcome aboard, and well done! I agree that presidents of the past got away with a LOT more than they do now, but I like the fact that our leaders of today aren't free to do as they please with no consequences.
ReplyDeleteWhile it sucks (pardon the pun) that Clinton got caught doing what he did (or, rather, had done to him), that kind of behavior shouldn't be tolerated by the leader of our country. And he paid the price for getting caught.
Consequently, lying to Congress, lying to the American people, and diverting our resources to bombing another country should not be tolerated, either.
So, with the good, comes the bad. When it comes to media coverage, it's certainly a different world than it was 40 years ago. Our leaders shouldn't act like it isn't.