The Media Sucks

Thanks to Howard Kurtz for once again pointing out how much the media's campaign coverage sucks. Talk about your easy jobs, Kurtz, ya bum. He notes a phenomenon that has been amusing me the past week or so: that all of the news sources who two weeks ago were proclaiming that the election was "John Kerry's to lose" (based, of course on some stupid opinion poll) are now writing about how Kerry is in disarray and it's Bush's race to lose (based, once again, on some stupid opinion poll). I'm just glad that these news sources have been able to push aside wasteful coverage of substantive issues in order to bring us these invaluable reports.

To be honest it reminds me a lot of Wall Street reporting, where you see these reporters come on CNN and say, "yeah the Dow index went up 56 points today due to speculation on the price of rubber in the Philippines during the rainy season". My ass. Hundreds of millions of shares were traded to produce that end result, by many thousands of people and organizations. You don't know what the hell caused it. Don't pretend it means anything. The daily ticks of the stock market don't mean anything and neither do the daily opinion polls of the presidential race. Stop wasting our time.