All the News That's Fit to Skew

“Bain Capital is like the ex-girlfriend Mitt tries to crops out of his profile picture but everyone can still see her arm.” ~ Andy Borowitz

This is what bothers me.

Instead of reporting about Robotron Romney’s lies within the context of….well, Robotron Romney’s lies, the media insist on burying the information in articles focused on the political race. The powerful opposition research arm of the Obama campaign. The “He said and then he said” b*llsh*t which turns people off and makes it so the actual information doesn’t get out.

Robotron lied about his role at Bain Capital, the Boston-based venture capital firm he founded back in 1984. Securities and Exchange Commission documents have surfaced showing that Robotron was head honcho from 1999 to 2001 – a period during which the company outsourced boatloads of jobs and drove companies it purchased into bankruptcy. Being the oily, integrity-challenged politician that he is, Robotron denies that he called any shots during this time.

Instead of shouting, “Romney’s a disingenuous, untrustworthy, mealy-mouthed jackass!” from the highest mountaintops, journalists – and I use that term loosely – frame the news in the context of the horserace, with poll numbers and rebuttals and references to message resonance and party affiliation. (See this Associated Press article.)

It’s all part of the disconcerting fact that the media are distorting reality and perpetuating a false equivalency in order to remain relevant, to sell ads and newspapers, to prop up the conservative, to keep people interested in a race that was already over until the Fourth Estate decided to resuscitate one candidate’s corpse and turn a shellacking into a cliffhanger.

Regular “What’s the Diehl?” readers know that I’m not the biggest fan of polls. It seems to me, however, that when the writing’s on the wall – such as when a recent Quinnipiac University poll finds Obama leading Robotron 54 to 34 percent among single voters or a recent Bloomberg poll finds Obama leading 53 to 40 percent among likely voters who view Robotron as “out of touch” – people ought to see it.

Instead, we’re told that the race is really, really close and Robotron’s expected to take this state and that state and Obama’s being hurt by voter frustration over the economy and his campaign has yet to hit its stride.

I’ve been more than a little critical of the POTUS in the past and I remain disappointed in some of his decisions and positions, but I know this: 1) he’s a hell of a lot more concerned about the plight of regular folks than the Mormon from Massachusetts, and 2) in a perfect world, Obama’s superiority over Romney in nearly every way would be trumpeted by reporters, not squelched.

Sure is an imperfect world, huh?

Sources: Detroit Free Press, Huffington Post, Bloomberg News.