An Open Letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanapoulos

[bhikkhu]

An Open Letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanapoulos
By Will Bunch
The Philadelphia Daily News

Thursday 17 April 2008

Dear Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos,

It's hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, "a shameful night for the U.S. media." It's hard because - like many other Americans - I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it's hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that "media criticism" - especially when it's one journalist speaking to another - tends to be a genteel, colleagial thing, but there's no genteel way to say this.

With your performance tonight - your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane "issue" questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters - you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it's even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to "export democracy," and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, "no thank you." Because that was no way to promote democracy. ...(snip)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041708B.shtml



My own perspective: in this country now 81% of the population thinks we are headed in the wrong direction. Last night was a prime example of what is wrong, and why things are so difficult to fix. Our media sucks.

Not because I support Obama - Hillary has been trashed far more, if anyone recalls - but because our media truly sucks. Anyone who wants to make a difference in "how things are" might begin by thinking how we can improve our news and information services. I have improved mine by shutting off the TV, permanently, and finding reliable sources online.