DETROIT -- Spring presents joyous opportunities to enjoy nature. The sounds of the insects and animals are inspiring. The chorus of the young amphibians joins with birds chirping, creating a lovely, soothing harmony. I am fortunate enough to live on a little pond, so these spring sounds are omnipresent and much appreciated.
I get to watch the water fowl swoop in and glide to graceful landings. There is a beaver shaping up his share of the pond. In the evening, deer stroll freely. The air smells cleaner, filled with the scent of la primavera, the beautiful Italian word for spring. The tranquility is a welcome respite from the human sounds and activities I must endure. The experience inspires.
Last Wednesday night, after a walk, I made a nature-inspired decision. Instead of watching the last Clinton-Obama debate before Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary, which I normally would feel duty-bound to do, I chose the pastoral. I chose to watch the Detroit Tigers play the Cleveland Indians on the lush spring grass in Comerica Park.
The Tigers, off to a slow start, got hot bats and battered the Tribe 13 to 2. It was comforting to see, enjoyed with the audio backdrop of the spring symphony in my pond. But as the game was winding down, I made a horrible error in judgment and channel-flipped to the debate.
I immediately sensed discord; my sensibilities were offended. The audience sounded testy, booing ABC's pompous anchor, Charles Gibson. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both looked weary and spent.
I soon learned that Gibson and his ABC co-host, George Stephanopoulos, had spent the first 45 minutes of the debate shamefully wallowing in trivial muck, insulting the candidates, and more importantly the audience, which deserved to have questions asked about substantive issues.
Instead, ABC made the conscious decision to front-load the debate with "gotcha" questions aimed at entertaining rather than enlightening its prime-time audience. As Walter Shapiro noted in Salon.com, "the debate easily could have convinced the uninitiated that American politics has all the substance of a Beavis and Butt-Head marathon."
Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, wrote that the spectacle was "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years. ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos focused mostly on trivial issues."
Mitchell is a Niagara Falls native, well versed in the failures of the smug inside-the-Beltway media, and the author of "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq."
He flayed ABC for its tabloid format: "Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health care and mortgage crises, the overall state of the economy and dozens of other pressing issues had to wait until the midway point for their few moments in the sun. Obama was pressed to explain his recent 'bitter' gaffe and relationship with Rev. Wright (seemingly a dead issue) and not wearing a flag pin, while Clinton had to answer again for her Bosnia trip exaggeration."
Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote, "Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos turned in shoddy, despicable performances."
The selection and framing of the flag-pin question illustrates how low ABC was willing to go to impugn Obama's patriotism. Lacking the courage to have their own names linked to such a vacuous topic, Gibson and Stephanopoulos used the old cover of letting just plain folks pose the question for them.
A crew from ABC videotaped Nash McCabe of Latrobe, Pa., for the occasion. The audio was perfect and the lighting expensive, creating a soft, homey image for the selected human prop for ABC's choreographed and orchestrated docudrama.
McCabe delivered her line: "Sen. Obama, I have a question and I want to know if you believe in the American flag. I am not questioning your patriotism, but all our servicemen, policemen and EMS wear the flag. I want to know why you don't." There you have it. Mrs. McCabe, your average voter from Western Pennsylvania -- the birthplace of Rolling Rock Ale and Arnold Palmer -- wants to know why this slick Harvard-educated lawyer with a foreign-sounding name holds the Stars and Stripes in such disdain.
I'll bet hordes of people across the Keystone State are wondering the same thing. Gibson and Stephanopoulos are not going to bury the tough questions. We gotcha, Barack. Where the hell is your flag pin? We know President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney always wear theirs.
ABC's grand inquisitors missed the fact that Clinton and Sen. John McCain are also usually dressed sans flag pins. But Obama was the target, and consistency is not a virtue for ABC's finest.
"We thought it made sense to deal with the core controversies," Stephanopoulos later told The New York Times. If flag pins are the core, what's on the fringe?
It turns out McCabe was not a random selection, picked from a string of man-on-the-street interviews -- m.o.s. interviews, as we call them in the TV news business. A couple of weeks before her ABC performance, a New York Times reporter interviewd McCabe in a report with the headline "In Ex-Steel City Voters Deny Race Plays a Role."
Certainly, McCabe didn't mention Obama's race as an issue, but she did "unpack the dossier she has been collecting in her head" about her dislike for the Illinois senator. She summed it up for Times reporter Paul Vitello, saying, "How can I vote for a president who won't wear a flag pin?"
Measuring patriotism in fashion and ornaments, McCabe added, "I watch him on TV. I keep looking for that lapel pin."
Some vermin at ABC News were looking for someone to go after Obama on the patriotism issue and they deliberately sought out McCabe, knowing full well she would pose the question they wanted to hear. That way Charlie and Georgie wouldn't have to get their manicured hands dirty.
During the debate, Stephanopoulos showed how shameless he really is, using a question prepared for him by none other than one of the Fox News Channel's prominent right-wing fanatics, Bushevik apologist Sean Hannity. It should be understood that Hannity is to journalism what Dr. Josef Mengele was to medical research.
That didn't bother Stephanopoulos. He grilled Obama about his association with Bill Ayers, a former member of Weatherman, a radical Leninist group that carried out some bombings in the 1970s. Ayers is now a college professor. For three years, Ayers and Obama were both directors of the Woods Charitable Fund of Chicago.
Stephanopoulos gladly carried the slur mail for Hannity, trying to link Obama with terrorist acts committed 40 years ago -- when Obama was 8 years old! Maybe ABC News should ask Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Karl Rove to help craft questions for the remainder of the campaign.
Blogging in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan called the ABC debate "one of the worst media performances I can remember -- petty, shallow, process-obsessed, trivial ... and utterly divorced from the actual issues that Americans want to talk about."
But The New York Times did manage to find a defender of ABC's losers. Former New York governor Mario Cuomo told the Times, "I'm certainly not going to criticize them for the subjects they selected, when everyone has been selecting those subjects for weeks and weeks."
Cuomo's statement was illogical. His use of the universal "everyone" is easily refuted by my own assertion that I -- and, I dare say, many others -- have not "been selecting those subjects for weeks and weeks."
More grievously, both Cuomo and the Times failed to mention Cuomo's association with ABC News and the clear conflict he has in discussing the judgment and competence of people working for the network.
His son, Chris, is co-anchor of ABC's "Good Morning America" and also reports for other network programs. Did anyone at the Times really think Mario Cuomo would in any way criticize his son's network and call ABC's top anchor and chief Washington correspondent "a pair of superficial schmucks"? The Times has some explaining to do for its glaring failure to mention the Cuomo-ABC relationship in the story.
McCain will be a guest Sunday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" (this column was filed before the show). McCain should be asked about being "very proud" of the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, a regular spewer of vitriolic anti-Catholicism. Does McCain agree with Hagee's view that a war with Iran will fulfill a biblical prophecy?
Stephanopoulos should ask McCain why he continuously belittles discussions about why we went to war in Iraq and his support of it as "a good academic argument." What does McCain think about a new report from the National Defense University that concluded, "Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle"?
But more suited to the ABC style is a close examination of "Giadagate." The senator's wife, Cindy, got caught red- handed swiping recipes from the Food Network and posting them on her husband's campaign Web site as "McCain Family Favorites." This is a "core controversy."
Forget about Iraq. Don't bother McCain with questions about his now-unflinching support for Bush's tax and war policies. What McCain should be pressed on is how he liked the Farfalle with Turkey Sausage, Peas and Mushrooms. Is it true he picked out the mushrooms?
The evidence shows Cindy McCain (or the intern she's blaming) stole the recipe from Giada De Laurentiis. Is a man whose wife steals recipes fit to become commander in chief? Some of the plagiarized recipes seemed elite -- dare I say, French. Are John McCain and his fabulously wealthy wife closet francophiles? How "core" does it get?
These are "relevant and essential questions," as Stephanopoulos described his own debate queries. But I may never learn the answers, since I'll be bonding with nature, enjoying baseball and no longer watching ABC News.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 22 2008 |