Elections: A War With Rhetoric as the Battlefield Smoke

Sadly, most people voting for the president(s) this year will have few issues presented in an easily understandable way to them by the media. I may be raising this issue as a personal problem, but I have a sneaking suspicion this is not the case, and that the cloudy speech of the media makes it hard for people to vote intelligently. For instance, how many average voters understand the Wall Street Bailout? Whom it benefits and whom it doesn't? What its impact will be for the future? And there are a whole host of other issues like it, from Green issues, to oil markets, health care, taxes, and foreign policy, just to name a few. Perhaps if the general public really knew the simplest explanations and implications of these issues, we would be finding things out that would cause us to demand more "change" in the US government than Barak Obama will ever bring!

Aside from the abortion issue, on which the candidates are clear, there are a whole pack of issues people want to understand and hear about from the media. People want to hear where the candidates stand, and they want (I think) to be able to grasp most of the major positions of the candidates. Maybe this is not possible, but I do know one thing--if it is possible, then the media makes it harder. Take for instance the vice-presidential debate. Depending on what media outlet one listens to, Biden or Palin could've "won." At least part of this is because the media engages in shaded questioning to benefit the political party and candidate they support. The following article is worth a read. It is not on Biden or Palin, but is instead on the moderator of the recent veep debate, Gwen Ifill. By reading this article, one discovers that her questions were often not designed to educate voters on the candidate's views, rather, her questions where rhetorical tools carefully designed to make Sarah Palin's answer's look bad.

Read it here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/gwen_ifills_vp_debate_bias.html

Another interesting fact:

In college, my sociology prof plugged NPR News as reliable because a poll was taken to measure listener misconceptions about US motives for invading Iraq. He noted that NPR listeners had "fewer" misconceptions than those who listened to other news networks. Thus, he was saying NPR is more factual. The interesting fact is this: Gwen Ifill, the vice-presidential debate moderator works for NPR News.

Gods Wisdom to You,

Greg