Posted by
halthouse1 on Thursday, April 02, 2009 6:00:00 AM
Watching The News: The Bias Is Sometimes To Much To Take
Before getting to the G-20 itself, I have to say that the coverage from some "news" outlets is unbelievable in it's biased love affair with President Obama. I know that this comes as no great surprise, but sometimes it gets to the point where it has to be brought up.
John Harwood is the Chief Washington Correspondent of CNBC and a political writer for the New York Times. I watch him report on CNBC, only because I watch the ticker on the bottom. As a correspondent, it is his job to report the news, not to invoke his opinion of the news. That is not the case and at times it is to much to bear.
The commentary Wednesday was that the throngs of protesters in downtown London stood in stark contrast to the throngs outside of Buckingham Palace expressing their adulation for President Obama, ostensibly proving the strength of his popularity not only in the United States, but in England and the rest of Europe as well. If that is the case John Harwood, then the protesters and anarchists must be an indicator of popular U.K. and European thought as well.
More likely, these are both relatively small groups of people drawn by a specific occasion. Each could be in the majority of English thought or minority, but it is not John Harwoods place to make that determination. I would also assume that not every person outside of the Palace was pro-Obama or pro-United States, but in this case of consistent partisanship, that possibility was not mentioned.
Anarchists and Financial Fools Day
In a world that is feeling the pain and frustration of the financial crisis, the protests that went on Wednesday in London by anarchists and other groups was for the most part non-violent, although uniform in the condemnation of the capitalist way of doing business.
The first thing that I was struck by is that as non-participants in capitalism, the protesters have more than enough time to travel to these summits and demonstrate.
The second thing that I was struck by was that it seemed as if there were some non-anarchist types interviewed who also seemed to question whether an alternative system might be better.
The problem as I see it is the potential for these types of protests and waves of dissatisfaction to slip from fringe groups to the regular folks who begin to understand the extreme depth and ramifications of the problem. These world leaders and rainmakers need to solve or stem the tide of the problem before the term social unrest spreads to groups that we would never have anticipated that it could spread to.