Funmurphys: the Blog

Biggles Asks Questions

Can I fire the press? I mean it, really.

I managed to watch the Bush press conference the other night – it slipped my mind that Band of Brothers was on over on the History channel. While President Bush clearly has some deficiencies – most notably public speaking, the press clearly has its own deficiencies, like anything to do with their job of reporting the news. The press acted like a bad Monty Python imitation: Confess your mistakes, confess your mistakes, apologize for your mistakes, confess to your inability to communicate, confess, confess, confess. Poke him again with another soft-in-the-head question. All that was missing was Cardinal Fang and the comfy chair.

The Q & A period did manage to make one thing clear at least: now we know why the Strother Martin character from NPR never gets called upon – although it did allow the President to demonstrate once again that sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand. So I guess I can’t complain that it was completely uninformative.

Sadly, the truth of the matter is that the press doesn’t work for me; it doesn’t work for you either. Oh, the press likes to talk about “serving the public interest” and “the people’s right to know” (oddly enough, that one isn’t in the constitution), but their job isn’t to inform the public, their job is to sell stuff. The newspaper people push whatever the department stores are selling, which by the looks of things is mostly bras and panties. The TV news people mainly hawk denture creams and adult diapers.

I mean if the press really was interested in giving us the news, why do they spend so much time on the titillation du jour (e.g. Kobe Bryant or Scott Peterson), and why would they pass up a chance to seriously question the President and instead try to play Gotcha!

Yeah, I know, it's their favorite game, even when they play it so poorly.