Once upon a time, yet, in my lifetime, there were news anchors that we trusted and news gathering organizations that held the highest principles of journalism craddled to their corporate bosom. The first obligation of American journalism is to the truth because it has been understood, from our very beginning, that the survival of our democracy depends on citizens having reliable and accurate information.
While editorials have always been part of a news presentation designed to persuade readers, viewers or listeners to a particular position, the news itself was a sacred trust. When Walter Cronkite finished a broadcast with, “And that’s the way it is…” we felt that, well, that’s the way it was. Truth stood above hearsay and hyperbole.
Today, however, content has taken a back seat to context, and this election, in particular, has been filled with half-truths, lies, fear mongering and empty rhetoric…and that’s just from the press.
The politicians have provided the pabulum but the media has feasted upon it to shore up viewers, ratings and revenue.
So, what else is new? This is the game that we’re playing and it isn’t going to end anytime soon, even if we all keep pretending that we’re sick of negative ads and slanted stories.
What’s more, if Tea Party driven Republicans sweep through the 2012 elections, the slander and insanely biased posts will, in fact, become worse in the 2014 midterms and two years later for the next Presidential race. Both sides will have seen that bigger lies, more twisted facts and more trumped up evidence to stain an opponent, are the elements that conspire to win elections.
Democrats are not innocent by any means and President Obama is guilty of truth tampering, as well, but his administration has been unfairly maligned more than any in history. Largely, that can be attributed to the growth of the internet and its vast resource of unverified and shorthand news to procure and define our allies and our enemies. The internet provides a constant barrage of false accusations, repeated lies, manufactured histories, misread statistics and emotional bias.
The talking points of Romney’s campaign, for example: a) Jobs, b) Medicare, c) Spending, d) Foreign Policy, are all issues that should, at the very least, carry a respectful debate because in every area President Obama has implemented, to varying degrees, successful, even bipartisan policies.
Yet internet hysteria pervades each as shallow conclusions have fed the conservative pipeline with false analysis that fan the populist flame.
It is not the responsibility of the press to bolster President Obama or to undermine Governor Romney, but it is their duty to investigate and reveal what is true and what is not and let the public decide.
What has happened instead is that false information is now reported as a viable news option and it’s repeated so often that the spongy middle of undecided voters are using malicious rhetoric to make decisions.
There is no other explantion for Governor Romney’s poll numbers going up after a debate in which nearly everything he said was, at least partially, erroneous. It was the mainstream media’s job to vigorously correct mistakes on both sides.
“Romney will put America back on course” is what I overheard after the first debate from a Romney supporter parroting his campaign refrain.
Of course, that was also George W. Bush’s campaign slogan and he was running against a long period of prosperity under Clinton.
Apparently, that rhetoric works.
Even if we take the intentionally biased media out of the equation for a moment; mainstream news sources have lost sight of their responsibility as the free press to keep the discourse honest. While I believe Bob Shieffer and Diane Sawyer to be committed journalists, their corporate bosses pander to sponsors and are so afraid of being accused of leftwing bias that even correcting lies is avoided.
24/7 news has devolved into the sharing of careless whispers and second hand information fabricated to tell stories that hold the interest of viewers with ever decreasing attention spans.
Mass media magnifies the drama of market swings, candidates mistakes, policy differences, and turn the most brutal realities of life, like war, into storylines that entertain more than they inform.
It would be nice to say that both parties are equally responsible for the propagation of 
thin and superficial information, but to say that it’s been 50/50 would be disingenuous and misleading. No, it has been the amorphous and platitudinal ideology of the right that has allowed extreme positions to overtake its once reasonable platform.
4 years of Republican leadership will have no choice but to create policy that is nearly identical to the paradigm forwarded by 8 years of George Bush (6 with a Republican Congress) that paved the road toward plutocracy and swayed the judicial branch of government to support an oligarchic agenda.
Okay…I’ve turned my premise into a political statement (that can’t be news to anyone), but this election will be about the economy and in the 4 years that follow January 20, 2013 we will see an economic upswing because we’re already in recovery. That is simply the truth…and I wish the media wouldn’t allow false rhetoric to re-define that reality.
The years that will follow the next term are the ones that concern me the most, and only a truthful press can keep the worst from happening…no matter who becomes President.
