Elizabeth Edwards on the Media: Do Your Job
27 April 2008 3:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
Elizabeth Edwards on the Media: Do Your Job
Guest post by Scan
Elizabeth Edwards has contributed a piece this morning for the New York Times entitled “Bowling 1, Health Care 0″. In it, she calls out the media for dramatically failing to do its job.
Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.
So who is responsible?
The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.
Elizabeth hopes that the voters of her home state get the information they need to make the right choice.
I was lucky enough for a time to have a front-row seat in this campaign — to see all this, to get my information firsthand. But most Americans are not so lucky. As we move the contest to my home state, North Carolina, I want my neighbors to know as much as they possibly can about what these men and this woman would do as president…
Do your job, so we can — as voters — do ours.
Amen to that. This is a great piece worth checking out.
Open thread.
