With only a few months left until the country will determine which Democrat will battle it out with John McCain in the presidential race next fall, I find myself getting more and more annoyed about what issues are making the news and what issues aren’t.
In the weeks leading up to the crucial Pennsylvania Primary, the “political analysis” on television news stations has focused on anything but the issues that are important to the people of the country. Food shortages are plaguing many poorer nations, the economy in the United States is in a dire state, people all over the country are facing layoffs, increased gas prices and the rising cost of, well, pretty much everything.
So which critical issue do we get to hear about when we turn on the news? How about Barack Obama innocently scratching his face. That’s what I saw on the news. Apparently some “analysts” have decided the innocent face scratch was actually Obama secretly flipping off the country in an oh so subtle way. You see it really makes perfect sense. I know if I were leading the Democratic nomination in the delegate count, and hoping to convince the rest of the delegates to choose me for the presidential nominee, that would seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I understand the problem. If your job is to provide 24-hour news coverage, and there isn’t too much going on, then maybe analyzing every wave and blink and hand gesture seems like something that might, someday, have some news value, and if they had reported on all of the other issues, you know the real ones that people actually care about, and then did a short spot on the fake news that everyone realizes is crap anyway, I probably wouldn’t mind, but that’s not how it works.
The questions that need to be asked and focused on are being ignored for hard-hitting stories like this one, or one about Hillary Clinton throwing back a beer and a shot at a bar in Pennsylvania or a million other trivial stories that have nothing to do with what is going on right now in the United States.
I’m pretty sure once we have elected one of the three candidates to be president, none of the silly details of these news stories will matter. What will matter is how they are going to help the country to deal with a depressed economy, global warming, unsteady foreign relations and all the other issues that are being ignored in those hard -hitting news stories.