It’s really funny how things happen.
Apparently Rock the Vote started a campaign e-mailing mock draft notices to members. Apparently the Republican National Committee didn’t really like this. Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the RNC, noted that he believed the “misinformation campaign” was “being conducting [sic] with malacious intent and reckless disregard for the truth.” His basis for this statement? Bush and Rumsfeld said that we won’t have a draft. (For the record, Kerry said the same thing.) Gillespie ordered RtV to cease and desist with the campaign or else face legal action.
Hmm, that’s interesting. I’d say the possibility’s still there, seeing as how I had to register for the thing and they say on their site that they’ll “maintain its readiness as required by law.”
Jehmu S. Greene, the president of Rock the Vote, didn’t like that as much as Gillespie didn’t like the first thing. In a response, Greene asserted that the organization had a right to publicize the possibility of a draft and marked Gillespie’s comments as “attempted censorship.”
My opinion? The draft issue will get young people (yes, men and women, seeing as how the latest draft legislation isn’t gender-biased) to vote, and it’s an issue concerning them. Rock the Vote had the right to do it. I think they might have been a bit too forward, from what I’ve heard, but they have the right – just like the RNC has the right to misleadingly characterize Kerry as a flip-flopper. It just scares me that either party would attack an organization whose sole purpose is to get people to vote over something like this.
Lots of good stuff over this at the Democracy Now! site. I’m really disappointed at how dirty this campaign has become for both sides – and it still bothers me that no matter how hard I try, no matter who tries to convince me, I can’t come up with a single reason why I’d vote for Bush. Must we resort to this sort of childish bickering on an issue this important? I really hope not, but I fear it’s already happened. Things like this really make me want to get into politics.
(An interesting aside: the RNC letter was cc’d to a few organizations, including Vince McMahon of WWE [that made me chuckle] and bigwigs at MTV, AOL, Time Warner, and NBC. The Rock the Vote letter? NBC, MTV, AOL, Time Warner… Jay, Conan, and David… and Jon.)
Though I accused him of being biased in my last post, at least he admits it – on national television, no less. Check these out.
Jon Stewart on Crossfire (or here)
Jon Stewart on the Daily Show talking about Crossfire
“They said that I wasn’t being funny… and I said to them, ‘I know that, but tomorrow I will go back to being funny and your show will still blow.’”
In my Introduction to Mass Communication class last year, Professor Laura Lindenfeld told us that there is no such thing as an unbiased source. Since news is reported by people, she explained, news will have a slant due to each reporter’s individual opinion.
Unfortunately, I’m finding that this trait of news is emerging at a most inconvenient time. It seems as though there have been many occasions at which I have found myself literally swearing at media outlets for a variety of reasons: slanted “factual” stories, unfair reporting, or, what’s worst, completely falsified reports. To illustrate:
- The Associated Press released a story that was automatically picked up by local news feeds reporting that Bush had won the election. The story apparently did not contain some sort of marker that would tell sites that it was test data.
- The Daily Show (yeah, yeah, I know) seems ever more and more liberal, especially after the differences in Republican and Democratic interviews after the first debate.
- Fox News (yeah, yeah, I know) posted a story that was apparently an in-house joke from their chief political reporter saying that Kerry said, among other things, “I’m metrosexual.”
Has all of top-level journalism gone back to high school? This isn’t what you should be doing, folks.
In my opinion, this is where the Internet could really shine. Is it possible to have a close-to-unbiased source for news? From a technical standpoint, yes. There are some politically-driven sites out there that work very well – take MoveOn.org (yuck) and Daily Kos, for example – but the ones I’ve found have all taken one side or the other. Why can’t there be one single source where people from both sides healthily debate the issues and try to disprove what the other side says? There have been so many misleading statements this year from both camps that the sheer number of people researching on the Internet could definitely debunk everything. There should be a site somewhere that takes every word from the debate – or from every article published on major news sites – and tries to assure that the reporting is given in a correct context. If anyone knows of a site, please let me know: justin@justinrussell.com.
I’ll be going through a lot of changes soon, and I’m reconsidering what’s important to me (of which this issue is one) and where I want to spend my time. Soon I’ll be launching a new package that will replace my current blog, and I’ll also be working on other projects that will comprehensively rework my most major sites. It’s time for me to step up. And please don’t forget to do your part to make the world better, too.
