Is the Media Up to the Challenge

With the two competing bills in Congress designed to end the “Great Default Debacle” doomed to failure even if one passes the House and the other the Senate, we, at Stevieslaw, are forced to ask the only sensible question: Can the media make these votes even remotely interesting? Both cable and network TV are planning to cover the voting with hordes of talking heads and the screen pyrotechnics left over from the 2008 presidential election. Even the print media has stopped printing multi-column personality analyses of that raving maniac in Norway to concentrate on what is sure to be a completely meaningless vote. If you watch, you can be sure that when Joe Smith from Wyoming votes for or against one or the other of these useless bills you will see his smiling face against a map of his great state along with the latest public opinion polls, which will provide you with great detail about what an uninformed public is thinking—some of which may even vaguely related to the issue at hand.
Smokey Diamond, our intrepid reporter and statistics whizz, will be compiling the truly important figures instead. He will monitor the ratings of the TV news shows, in nearly real time, by logging on to ratingsblog.com, to see who is winning or losing the battle. Early money is on Fox. Their behind the scenes promotion of a pledge of “no new taxes even if it forces the end of the world”—has rallied the social conservatives—many of whom spend their entire adult lives longing for exactly that. They will flock to Fox. On the other hand, MSNBC’s “Trotsky Look Alike,” contest to promote taxing the rich, has not been doing nearly as well, perhaps because the winner will be forced to spend two weeks in the former Soviet Union—mostly in Siberia.
Don’t waste your time watching the vote. Log on to Stevieslaw early and often. We will provide you with the all important media ratings as soon as we get around to it.