[NU Sports] mostly off-topie political thread

[Mike Nolan]

Oh what the heck, NU basketball is boring (as usual) and there's a limit 
to how much prognostication about the 2009 football season we can make 
at this point.  (National Signing Day is only a few weeks away, though.)

I got the impression back in my days at NU (67-72) that Medill students 
had to take 'background' courses in other areas so that they had some
inkling of what it was they were writing about.  If that is no longer
the case, I'm concerned.

Jay Leno never seems to run out of people to interview on the street 
whose knowledge of either history or current events is dwarfed by that of 
the nearest tree stump.  

BTW, I could only come up with six of the nine justices on the Supreme
Court.   (I blanked on Souter, Breyer and Alito)

> Back when everyone bought a newspaper, there were many  voices in the press. 

There are still varied voices out there, they just aren't all in print, 
which is not surprising because print is no longer the dominant medium,
having been supplanted by radio, then by TV, and now by the Internet,
though the line between TV and the Internet gets blurrier every day.

I think my older son treats both Comedy Central and the Food Network as 
news channels.  I won't be surprised if Jon Stewart wins a Pulitzer for 
his coverage of the election.  (Hell, he may even deserve it.)  

Fox News seems to have a very conservative right-wing orientation 
(so much so that it is a target for satire), and of course talk 
radio is largely dominated by Rush and his conservative brethren.  
(Actually, I think too many 'conservatives' give 'conservatism' a
bad name these days.) 

On PBS you have the McLaughlin Group, where the panel is almost always
a bit right of center, some of them a bit right of Attilla the Hun.
Then you have the (usually) token left-winger, Eleanor, who I think is 
still wearing widows weeds over the death of the Hillary Clinton candidacy. 
(I miss Jack Germond and Freddie 'the Beetle' Barnes as panelists, though.)

Doonesbury certainly had no love lost for the Bush administration, it'll
be interesting to see how Obama fares there. 

In the Internet you have the Drudge Report.  I actually heard someone
compare Matt Drudge to Drew Pearson, which IMHO is like comparing Tiny
Tim to Frank Sinatra.  

Hollywood may be the biggest player of them all, as well as the sneakiest
in terms of their way of slanting things.  I noticed the Golden Globes 
falling all over HBO for their docudrama "Recount".  I know someone 
who sat in on many of the official meetings on the 2000 election in 
Florida, he tells a somewhat different picture about them than either 
the left or right-wing media did.

The voices are there, and people still tend to drift to the voices they 
prefer to hear.   
--
Mike Nolan