Some of Nothing

Petition Party
Friday, April 18, 2008

MoveOn has a petition deriding ABC's coverage and--more importantly--linking it to the larger concerns about reporting, in general. They're a little late to the game here since we've already got a petition of our own out saying the same thing (only with more words because more is always better).

Even though there's now some competition in the "tell the media they suck" petition marketplace, I think ours is still super important. It's a good thing that MoveOn has decided to dedicate time and resources to this issue because it's an indication that they, a national organization, see some value in it. And, given the amount of resources they have, they're more likely to get some serious traction out of it. However, our petition is still necessary because it's people-powered and shows that, even though we don't have the resources of MoveOn, we are concerned enough to spend what little time and energy we have on it ourselves. Plus, our petition removes some of the political motivation out of it. We're not making a name. We're making a point. That's important (read: sign our petition!).

The point we're making is that we, the real people the media often claims to speak for, don't like the stuff they think we like. The media uses their web stats to justify their choices to spew irrelevance because those stats apparently indicate that people click more on the irrelevant, frivolous stories. Even if I weren't skeptical about those statistics, I would argue that people mostly choose to read the stories that the media actually does well. And most often, it's the stupid crap that they actually do well rather than the more complex issue-driven stories. They can't do the complex stuff well enough to make it relevant to people's lives, so they do the stupid stuff and say that's what we want. As I've mentioned before, they can't seem to figure out that their readership/viewership is shrinking because they're not giving us what we want. Trying to out-sleaze Fox "News" and steal their viewership is a losing strategery. They need to start appealing to us.

Or as Jon Stewart explained to them:

Stop hurting America.

Added Bonus
The Daily Show covers the ABC debate (from Crooks and Liars):

(Why is it that Comedy Central can revise its website like a hundred times but still can't figure out a better way to deliver its video? Just wonderin.)

PS I once whined that I wanted people to start being less single-issue focused and more systemic-problem focused. Gye Greene responded by asking what the systemic problems were. I think how our media and government work together to make us stupid is an example of a systemic problem.

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Nothing New byslag at 10:24 AM