FISA Vote Aftermath: Day One - Hey, did you hear the latest about Christie Brinkley's divorce?! [View All]

[robertpaulsen]

I woke up at 7am Pacific Time and turned on The Today Show on NBC. Not because they are my primary source for obtaining news, but I consider their top of the hour stories to be a good barometer of what the sheeple absorb into their cabezas as what constitutes the news of importance in the world today. I tuned in attentively, thoroughly convinced the passage of the FISA bill in the Senate would be the top story.

How silly of me. The lead story was Jesse Jackson's off-air live mic comments on FAUX News and how that would affect Obama's campaign. No, that's not as bad as leading off with the Brinkley divorce, I know, but it still has a somewhat salacious quality that our brain-dead, corporate-reined MSM always gravitates toward. A whispered conversation containing the semi-expletive "nuts" takes priority over the implications of our executive branch wiping its ass with the 4th Amendment and our legislative branch flushing the toilet. I suppose some may argue this is good news: publicizing offensive remarks at Obama's expense and Jackson's subsequent apology diminishes the media exposure of Obama's controversial support of the FISA bill. I suppose it does. But I would also argue that political expediency for short term gain rarely does anyone any good in the long term. The debate over this contentious issue needs to be in the public domain for the good of everyone. When it gets buried, everyone loses.

That's exactly what has happened. The FISA bill story was buried on The Today Show. It wasn't the second story, or even the third. I actually lost count of the number of stories reported before they got to the FISA bill, but I remember glancing at the clock when they did and it read 7:16. Buried. In a one sentence report that it passed 69-28. Then, no kidding, straight into the late breaking news in the Christie Brinkley divorce. I suppose I should give NBC a little credit for reporting the FISA vote before the Brinkley divorce. After all, if you enter "FISA vote" and "Christie Brinkley" on Google News, you get 2,047 stories for FISA vote and 3,825 stories for Christie Brinkley.

I suppose the excuse for burying the story is that the FISA vote story just isn't sexy enough. I'm tired of this excuse. I think Bill Maher said it best: "The media’s first job should be to make interesting what is important. And they fail at that. They would much rather dig up a dumb sex scandal than make interesting a bigger scandal that is not as sexy." We've been distracted from a fascist descent by titillation. I hope that Feingold is correct that President Obama will be able to reverse the worse aspects of this legislation. At this point, hope is the only thing we have left. Freedom left the building. It wasn't sexy enough.