What's Up With The Media?

[Ron]

In a NY Times story entitled, "In Kerry's campaign, his wife is an X factor," the first three paragraphs explain that due to Heinz Kerry's interest in alternative medicine and reading medical journals, she spotted a potential problem on his prostate cancer screening results and got him to have his blood retested. Sure enough, she had caught something that the doctors had missed--he was in the early stages of prostate cancer.

So here's the very next paragraph:

"Heinz Kerry may well have saved her husband's life. Yet the episode underscores how, politically, she may be both an asset and a liability for the senator. While she is known as a highly intelligent and devoted spouse who looks after her husband, Heinz Kerry has a reputation as being offbeat if hot a little odd, and even some Democratic strategists say that could complicate the Kerry campaign's efforts to make the Kerrys appealing to voters."

Let's see: "saved her hustand's life" followed in rapid succession by: "liability," "offbeat," "odd" and "complicate" the Kerry's campaign. Smart lady if you ask me. I mean, $150 million was embezzled from my branch of Citibank here in Tokyo, but during the three years this was going on my wife noticed nothing unusual in our monthly bank statements. [I'm not letting her anywhere *near* my blood test results.] All to say, who wouldn't want Heinz Kerry on their team?

The media, to my mind, is spineless. They don’t have the balls to come out and say what they *really* believe--namely, that intelligence and candor among both politicians and their spouses are political negatives. And until they do, stories like the one above read as nothing more than the childish musings of political strategist wannabies. But that those musings contribute to the dumbing down of American politics should be cause for concern--and the topic of many a story as written by political strategist-wannabie reporters.