Obama's Epistle unto the Democrats

(Full text of Obama's speech from MSNBC)

There are several reasons why I didn’t cover Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention last Thursday, not just because (as I suspect) no one is reading this blog except me. I’m not going into them too deep, except to say that if I had been diligently typing away notes on the speech (as I did for both Hillary and Bill Clinton’s speeches) I wouldn’t have been able to truly listen to the speech. And that would have been a shame; Obama’s speech before the DNC was one of the most amazing things I had ever heard.

But I don’t really want to talk about what Obama said; instead, I want to focus on what the media has said since.

Now I had planned to try not to sound partisan here, but it’s difficult not to. I can’t help it; I’m not doing news and I have no pretensions to do the news. I don’t have to display a reporter’s objectivity because I’m not a reporter, not pretending to be a reporter, not playing at being a reporter (well, OK, playing at it a little); this is a commentary made up of my opinions and anyone who doesn’t like it can go hang. With that said, here’s my impression of the coverage of the Obama speech.

The range of coverage is interesting. On the one hand you had Fox News, trying desperately to find some fault, any fault, to cast Obama as grasping at straws when he wasn’t, to outright ignore most of the speech (since it was mostly directly on point and the Republicans couldn’t claim that he wasn’t directly on point), and generally doing everything possible to minimize the impact of a speech that had the force of an ICBM up the collective Republican ass.

On the other hand, you had everyone else.

As I listened to one Fox commentator after another try to put a spin of Obama’s speech that was at complete odds with reality, I couldn’t help but wonder if they had even been listening to the same speech I had. Was there a different Barack Obama addressing a different Democratic National Convention that night? It seemed to me that Fox was totally unprepared for the speech Obama delivered; odd, since the speech was distributed in printed form to news media before it was actually given.

I remember Keith Olberman (MSNBC) actually quoting Obama’s speech half an hour before Obama had given it (at least he cited his printed source). Nothing wrong with this; it’s done all the time on the stage of political theater where everything is scripted and as little as possible is left to chance. But I wonder what Fox was doing with that extra time. You’d think that they’d have their news writers working at warp speed trying to find some fault, some hole, some factual error in the text; if the coverage they gave the speech was any indication, they couldn’t find a thing and were unprepared to refute any of the very direct and specific arguments Obama had made. So, by and large, they ignored them and even went so far as to imply that Obama hadn’t made any direct or specific arguments. Huh?

As you might have guessed, I listened to the speech on MSNBC (look for it here) and followed the glowing praise after the speech for about fifteen minutes, before switching to Fox News to see what other opinions were being expressed. From what Fox was saying, I might have been listening to the wrong speech. Fox was characterizing Obama's speech as the desperate attempt of an eventual loser to try to shore up support and steel a few undecided fools away from the inevitable victor, Saint John the Veteran. I certainly hadn’t been listening to that speech!

But just to see what was being said elsewhere, I went elsewhere. I looked in on CNN’s coverage, and what I heard there was more in keeping with my own impressions of a masterful political speech delivered clearly, of a speech that avoided demonizing John McCain and that was all about unity, not just party unity but national unity. A speech that, rather that being divisive, attempted (and to a surprising degree succeeded) to bring us all together as Americans. Now, that was my impression of the speech, which I watched, but which was echoed by most commentators in their comments after the fact, commentators on MSNBC and CNN and a few other places I checked.

It was not the direction that Fox went with its coverage. Reality wasn’t in that direction either.

If I wanted to, I could fill this blog with examples of bias in Fox News, indeed could make this entire blog about the misstatements, inaccuracies, and outright lies from Fox News. I’m not going to. Others do a much better job of that than I; besides, if I did that I’d have to actually watch a lot more of Fox News. I don’t think I could stomach that. But in this case, with the best political speach since JFK’s inaugural address still ringing in my ears, I could not sit back and let Fox’s totally biased coverage under the guise of news go by without comment. A biased comment, I will admit, but at least I didn’t make anything up.

The gang at Fox can’t say the same.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.