PROPAGANDA OR PROPER GANDERING?

Now that I have worn a path between my habitual intertube news and opinion sources during the run up to the election over the past few years I have this new momentum of reinvested interest in the promising future of this country I trusted long ago much more than its politicians have since belied. I stepped into a journalistic arena that has morphed from the ideal of probing investigations of facts behind the headlines and before opinions into an array of news superstars spinning tidbits of gossip into national scandal like the trash in the wind howling down canyon-like city streets between insulated bank skyscrapers while ignoring the truth behind government denials of economic corruption.

I reentered by getting hooked on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, the single remaining practitioner of the old school of journalism understanding, “Governments lie.” I use it as the calibration device by which I judge the depth and spin to which others treat her reports, most of which are ignored by all the networks — and the blogs who only add their two cents to the MSM spin as if upping the price made it truer.

Next came Keith Olbermann’s Countdown and his first few special comments righteously lambasting the Bush administration were as cathartic to me as they obviously were to him. As time went on he began to bug me with his obsession with, and consequent popularization of his perceived nemesis, Bill O’Reilly. In the past year a new face began bringing a calmer, more humorous approach to the show while bolstering his arguments.

Rachel Maddow apparently had quite a following of talk radio fans from her time at Air America since MSNBC gave her her own show following Keith after a short period of kibitzes on his. Although it doesn’t make much sense to have two programs back-to-back that essentially cover the identical news items, it does emphasize the differences in their approaches to journalistic reportage with Rachel faring better for my taste. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do the same thing but are more purposefully contrasted, much like Olbermann and O’Reilly.

It was Rachel’s humor last night that prompted this paean to her fresh enthusiasm exemplifying the possibilities of our next generation getting it right finally. In the picture above she is comparing the Bush/Cheney scramble to rewrite history for their legacy make over and last minute ass covering legislation to two drunk teenagers who have crashed the family car into the living room and who, rather than having the keys taken away, rev the engine and ask anyone if they’d like to go around the block one more time. She is a delight among the sad plethora of pundits twisting different pretzels out of the same ingredients.