In the year since Aphrodite Jones published Michael Jackson Conspiracy, in which she questioned the true impartiality of the media, other critics have begun to express similar concerns about media ethics.
Of course, when Jones expressed her criticism of the media's professionalism concerning the Michael Jackson trial, the media's reaction was muted.
But now that the media's professionalism is being examined during the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, well, now more people are tapping into the dangers that Jones was warning everybody about one year ago.
If journalists got away with reporting wrong predictions in 2005 as fact about a trial while the case was still being presented, why should it surprise us today that journalists are also trying to get away with reporting wrong predictions in 2008 as fact about a campaign season that is still months away from election day?
In Frank Rich's column in The New York Times, Rich expressed outrage that the media allowed itself to be distracted by inconsequential issues whereas the debate should have been about real concerns that face the electorage.
"Ludicrous as the whole spectacle was, ABC would not have been so widely pilloried had it not tapped into a larger national discontent with news media fatuousness. The debate didn’t happen in a vacuum; it was the culmination of the orgy of press hysteria over Mr. Obama’s remarks about “bitter” small-town voters. For nearly a week, you couldn’t change channels without hearing how Mr. Obama had destroyed his campaign with this single slip at a San Francisco fund-raiser. By Wednesday night, the public was overdosing.
"... But the overreaction to this latest gaffe backfired on the media more than it damaged him. ...
"Thus did another overhyped 2008 story line go embarrassingly bust, like such predecessors as the death of the John McCain campaign and the organizational and financial invincibility of the Clinton political machine against a rookie senator from Illinois. ... "
Rich concludes his column by hoping that consumers of media, who, in this case, watched the debate on the ABC Network, are "mad as hell" at the media's lack of professionalism and, consequently, "won’t take it anymore."
To me, that's wishful thinking.
Where was the outrage one year ago when Jones was sounding this alarum bell?
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