The interview was quite a scoop for the French magazine, the senator, up to that point, had given few interviews to the foreign press. Obama discussed his campaign and gave an explosive assessment of the Iraq war:
“It is a defeat for the United States, indeed. And we will pay the consequences for this defeat for a very a long time.There is no longer any way to turn this defeat into victory. It is too late.”
But soon, Politique Internationale found they had a problem.
Barack Obama never gave such an interview, ever.
Very low in the same blog post is probably the most important part:
The American TV networks can’t pay their sources of information: it is an important ethical rule. On the other hand, they pay their consultants — often very generously. The line between “source” and “consultant” often becomes fuzzy. The credibility of the journalists rests on the experts whom they interview. But the credibility of the experts is based on the number of passages on TV news shows or quotations in the print media. In this closed system, alarm bells which should ring from time to time, seemed to have remained mute about Debat.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t post this nugget of comedy in “news” (which isn’t exactly news so much as it is drama; presidential campaigns are weird and not always relevant to peoples’ lives):
I’ve noticed this a lot recently on CNN, especially since their redesign. It’s not an issue of not fronting enough ‘good for you’ serious news versus tabloidy stuff. It’s more that they increasingly feature ‘weird but true’ stories as their lead. Not sure what that’s about.
Yep. I’ve stopped looking at CNN’s site (though they do have nice, bulleted story summaries atop each story) as much as I used to for this reason. Edging toward infotainment. News of the weird gets forwarded a lot, but can you really feel good about that at the end of the day?
…this really makes me want to write up a post on Jeanne Moos I’ve been holding back for about a year.
I’m sick this weekend, but basking in the glow of an Elway-style, fourth-quarter comeback win.
So here’s my first vaguely relevant post in a few days. Michael Roberts, a media commentator at Westword (Denver), just read the comics in the dailies (Post and Rocky) for the first time in a while and found them unfunny. Yeah, OK, we all know they’re not laugh-out-loud funny and who really cares, right?
All but a relative handful were creatively slack, aggressively unoriginal and about as amusing as an attack of intestinal distress miles from the nearest restroom.
