Pure political pornography--that's what has dominated American airwaves for the past 24 hours. It's enough to make the producers of Desperate Housewives downright jealous.
We can thank Bob Schieffer of CBS for the first story. In Wednesday's final presidential debate, Moderator Schieffer asked President Bush, "Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?" The second story is about a conservative media personality, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News Channel, who has been accused of sexual harassment. And unnatural acts with Middle Eastern food.
Surfette demands that someone confess: Who suggested to Mr. Schieffer that the origin of sexual preference was one of the questions Americans needed Messrs. Bush and Kerry to answer in order to earn our votes?
That's right, a scant 18 days before Americans go to the polls, the nation's leading television news outlets and others have embraced the opportunity to connect the 2004 presidential election to gay sex and viewer polls on the origin of sexual preference , embarrassed parents, embarrassing parents, polls about the candidates discussion of gays, whether or not the Democratic candidate gay-baited, and falafel. Story after story after story after story after story after story. And those links are just the good ones.
As a result, real news has played second-fiddle today. For hours this afternoon, the homepage of Google News had no mention of today's Iraq dead, its algorhithms instead picking up stories about the Vice President's lesbian daughter. As for the deficit--how many trillions of dollars is it today?? Enough that Congress raised the debt limit this week anyway -- it wasn't exactly page-one fodder. Political porn even pushed down reports of neck-and-neck polls, which haven't made great TV (A control room, somewhere: "Yeah, Frank Newport's great-looking for a wonk, but that Mary Cheney is hot! Run it!") Hey, it's a creative challenge in any medium to deliver a visual of MISSING flu vaccines--not to mention money was never been appropriated to fulfill the No Child Left Behind Act.
Surfette is not immune to the lure of political porn, no indeedy. She is horrified and riveted by the Cheneys' reaction to this story, and if you're not, read Dave Cullen. I also care whether Bill O'Reilly, who managed not to drop dead of shame earlier in his career, has indeed sexually abused a young woman in his employ, as alleged.
But, as an American who plans to vote on Nov. 2, I think we should all congratulate news outlets (like this one) who have nothing about either controversy on their front pages and are instead raising essential policy issues -- not "distractions", to The Lemonblog's point.
And when it comes to political porn, we should ask ourselves--and tell the networks--who cares?
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