The BEAST's Ten Worst Presidential Election Campaign Hacks

[eg101]

From the Buffalo Beast: some excerpts:


10 - GEORGE WILL, NEWSWEEK --Will uses big words and pompous literary references to dress up what are basically the brutish and vulgar thinking patterns of a non-union meat-packing plant owner. He is a pig in a lace hat.
...


8 - ROBERT NOVAK, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES ...Novak, even after he fell and broke his hip after the first debate, was back blasting away at Don Rumsfeld from his hospital bed two days later. The guy is really unstoppable. At the end of his life, he's going to be like the machine in the last frames of The Terminator, legs gone, flesh all burned off, crawling forth in the abandoned factory, spewing venom about government spending. One has to admire that.

Novak is in the top ten because of that dreary purse-lipped sadist's face of his. (You've seen that face before: the prison warden meets high school vice-principal of your nightmares, shitting on your wife's back.) That plus his outing of Valerie Plame is suddenly being upheld as a free-press issue. He makes the list because he recently told an audience of Penn State students that he is only able to stand James Carville because "CNN pays me a lot of money."
....

7 - JODI WILGOREN, NEW YORK TIMES

In fact, if you look at it closely, the campaign was mainly a conversation with itself. And if you look at the campaign as it existed in the media, it was entirely a conversation with itself. Virtually everyone who is allowed to tell us what to think of the candidates, their positions and the state of our politics in general is an insider of some kind. In this movie, only the guild members—candidates, spokespeople, talking heads, pundits and pollsters—get the speaking lines. The rest of the country is represented by crowd shots and poll numbers. In order to understand why this is, you have to grasp an essential truth about our political journalism. What our political reporters do for a living is sell the campaign to the population, not speak for the people to the campaign. This is most vividly demonstrated in who actually gets to talk in campaign coverage.

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more here:
http://www.buffalobeast.com/63/top10hacks.htm

[clovis29]

1. as I suspected

[Warpy]

2. HAHAHAHA!

4. James Bennett, New Yorker

I'm glad I missed the original article. I wonder if Bennett got his start in a bible college writing hard core porn on the side...