Again: This will not end well
September 15, 2009 12:01 pm ET by Jamison Foser
Last week, I predicted that the furor around Joe Wilson's "you lie" outburst will end badly.
The media was not only obsessing over the sideshow, forgoing yet another opportunity to actually inform the public about health care and the efforts to reform the insurance system. Even worse, they were all but ignoring the substance behind Wilson's claim, taking a pass on the question of whether Wilson was correct or not. (He wasn't.)
The media was not only allowing Wilson's outburst to divert the entire health care debate to a discussion of the relatively small matter of how, if at all, health care reform would treat people who are in the country illegally, they were repeating his false claim over and over without indicating its falsity.
That behavior has continued. And, incredibly, reporters actually praise news reports that fail to examine the question of whether Wilson was telling the truth. Take this Washington Post news report today: 1,300 words, not one of them indicating whether Wilson was right or wrong. 1,300 words, and it omits a central -- perhaps the central -- fact of the controversy: Wilson was wrong. And Politco's Jonathan Martin praises it as a "good story."
This will not end well.
Part of the reason this is going the way it is, is due to the fact that we, as a nation, are all too often mere passive recipients of the media. Just like government, we can and should be involved in this process.
Then I read Glenn Greenwald at the Salon and am deeply dissappointed in our elected Democrats, Obama and the other centrists that constantly roll over for special interests so that nothing of the liberal agenda I so support has a chance of passing into law. We will continue to spend all our tax dollars on wars, supporting corporate profits and suppressing the middle and lower class.
This nation is doomed to mediocrity and senseless bickering.
On interesting point: Wilson's ejaculation appears to have become the de facto official Republican response to the president's speech (who even gave the officially official one?). I'm not sure whether, in this media climate, that helps the Democrats or not, though: As Republicans see that such antics get ink, we may see more of them.
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Come over to my blog to debate health care