Reflections

Is there any chance that NBC News or CBS News or ABC News or CNN or MSNBC or Fox News will give one tenth as much airtime to Nancy Keenan‘s speech (ongoing as I blog) on the differences between the candidates on reproductive rights as they gave today to vague meta-talk about “what Obama needs to do” to win over Hillary Clinton’s supporters? No.

And yet Keenan’s speech if full of actual information, noting that “the Supreme Court is at an ideological tipping point . . . and the next president will decide Roe‘s fate.” I think well-informed liberals and conservatives alike would basically agree with that, but many voters don’t seem to realize this. Watching Keenan would leave viewers better informed than they were previously. Watching talking heads ponder the PUMA phenomenon accomplishes, well, I couldn’t quite say what. And of course that’s arguably better than watching Glenn Beck call Mitt Romney a socialist without any contradiction from Wolf Blitzer — that programming is directly misleading; taking it seriously would leave you less informed than if you’d just played XBox.