Just how frantic are the Obama-loving media getting in the wake of their hero's horrible performance in last week's presidential debate?
Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi on Tuesday actually wrote, "[I]t should be illegal to publish poll numbers" (serious vulgarity warning).
Taibbi's piece is hysterically called, "How the Hype Became Bigger Than the Presidential Election: Blame the media for making whole generations hate The Process."
He began by making it clear what he thinks of the two candidates.
"It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face."
Yes, it only took one paragraph for Taibbi's first sexual reference, and it was all downhill from there.
Next, he carped and whined about how awful the process of picking presidents has become resulting in "an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families."
Taibbi continued pouncing on the media saying, "[T]he networks have spent two years finding new ways each day to convince [viewers] that the world is going to disintegrate into some commie or Hitlerian version of Mad Max, to keep [viewers] coming back and watching ads."
Is this anything new? In fact, isn't that how they got Obama elected in the first place?
Yes, he really advocated a law be enacted in America because they have it in Russia. You can't make this up.
What was Taibbi's reasoning?
"Banning poll numbers would force the media to actually cover the issues. As it stands now, the horse race is the entire story – I can think of a couple of cable networks that would have to go completely dark tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if they had to come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn't centered on who was winning."
"That's the dirtiest secret we in the media have kept from you over the years," he continued, "Most of us suck so badly at our jobs, and are so uninterested in delving into any polysyllabic subject, that we would literally have to put down our shovels and go home if we didn't have poll numbers we can use to terrify our audiences."
It seems a metaphysical certitude Taibbi wouldn't be saying any of this if the poll numbers were largely in Obama's favor. It's certainly no coincidence that this piece wasn't published after the Democratic National Convention when the President was riding high in such polls.
Despite this, Taibbi did offer an observation that warrants serious consideration.
"Mainly for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone. In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote."
This is all true except for the first five words.
The "grim commercial reasons" are likely for the top brass at media outlets singularly focused on the bottom line assuming such exist.
However, the grunts like Taibbi "reporting" the news behind cameras or keyboards manipulate people for their own political reasons.
And that's the part of "The Process" that is the saddest of all.
