forced equivalants

Traditional Journalists working for print, radio, and TV sources still seem to believe that being "objective" and "balanced" means to parrot what "both sides" of the story and let the reader/listener/viewer decide where the truth lies. But one if one is saying up is down? The response has been to repeat that too. Or less bad, what if one candidate is doing something bad, but in order to seem "fair," the press use that candidate's trumped up "but he's just as bad as me" research against the other candidate?

Well both have happened in the last eight years, and yesterday I saw a classic example of the latter. McCain hired as his White House transition guy someone who "earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac, one of the companies McCain blames for the nation's financial crisis." And this guy wasn't just a lobbyist for them once upon a time, he was "registered to lobby for Freddie Mac from 2000 through this month." "McCain's campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations"...let that sink in for a minute. Most experts think lack of regulation is at least one of the causes for this financial mess. And most recent college grads don't make $30,000 a year, I didn't make more than $30,000 until after law school, five years out of college.

But on CNN, they only talked about Rick Davis (they said $35,000 a month) and then compared this to Obama having Jim Johnson, a former Fannie Mae CEO in the 1990s, who headed Obama's VP search committee for a few months. And then also mentioned another former Fannie CEO who the McCain campaign in a TV ad claims Obama got advice from because some articles called him an Obama adviser, something anyone claims who wants to seem close to a candidate.

Oh and the Obama campaign claims that "26 McCain advisers and fund-raisers who have lobbied for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac." Let's see 26 lobbyists working for the McCain campaign versus two ex-CEOs, one of whom met Obama once for like 5 minutes. In what world are these two the same thing?