Get Serious
It’s almost as if they don’t know we have two wars, a huge deficit, a struggling economy, a collapse of the housing market, a rising crime rate, and the government listening to our phone calls.
Oliver Willis notes that the The Press Is Broken: “The NY Times does a photo investigation of which candidates do and don’t wear flag lapel pins.” They actually assigned people to look at photographs to determine who spent a buck on a flag pin, and whether they wear it constantly.
August Pollack deals with this overwhelmingly critical issue in his latest cartoon: Flagged for context.
In Wrong is right Paul Krugman looks at the claim that you can’t take anyone seriously who opposed the Iraq War, even when, like Barack Obama, they opposed it for exactly the right reasons. Apparently the only people who can be taken seriously are warmongers.
You have to wonder if the legacy media™ will figure out in time to save itself that people stop reading and listening when they notice it isn’t covering anything important, and it keeps getting things wrong.
2 comments
August is right on target as usual.
Flags on lapels? Ridiculous! I wore one right after 9/11/2001, as did 3/4 of Americans, until I realized that the Bushists intended to use the tragedy for political purposes. The meaning of an American flag on one’s lapel has long since been transformed into something entirely political and completely inappropriate. Apologies to those who wear one in good faith, but it is in no way a test of one’s patriotism.
As to the legacy media™, they may as well follow their instincts and show Britney’s ****: that will turn heads, and showing it is at least not a hypocritical gesture. The flags-on-lapels story is just a different kind of whoring, without the prurient interest.
They have the ability to do the in-depth research and reporting that the ‘Net can’t yet manage. They can’t possibly beat the ‘Net on breaking news, so they should go with their unique capability and sell it. People will pay for solid reporting, but they are not going to buy a newspaper filled with the same wire service copy they can get on the ‘Net for nothing.
As for their web presence – teasers referencing the printed version and a delay posting the entire story.
the need to add value to their product, not their stock price.