Teresa's Back
Reported by Eleanor - August 3, 2004 -
The "shove it" comment has lost its news value, but the media is hanging onto every word coming out of Teresa Kerry's mouth. The latest is her, "Four more years of hell!" remark coming out of a rally in Milwaukee that Fox is playing up this morning (Aug. 3, 10:15 a.m.).
It seems that some hecklers were shouting, "Four more years!" and Teresa shouted back, "Four more years of hell," and then shouted, "Three more months!" repeatedly. (Ah, another gem for the media's trashing machine.) The Fox anchor asked the guests, "Is she an asset or a liability?" Naturally, the democrat, Michael Feldman said asset, and the republican, Ed Rogers said liability. (Personally, I vastly admire that woman for expressing her real emotions when she knows that the media makes a mountain of "shove it" remarks and "bunny suits" and will play this up as inappropriate because it's coming from her.)
Not getting much traction from the latest Teresa adventure, the conversation moved on to explore another democratic negative, with "Why didn't Sen. Kerry get more of a bounce, with four nights of speeches devoted to building him up?" Of course, Mike and Ed had opposing views again.
Comment: The democrat missed an opportunity to point out the obvious, that Kerry did NOT have the advantage of "four nights of speeches" devoted to the democratic cause. Anyone watching the convention with a discerning eye knows that out of approximately 50 speeches scheduled from 7:00 to 11:00 ET, MSNBC covered about one-third of them, CNN less than that, and Fox covered the least of all, except for NBC, CBS, and ABC with about three hours total. C-SPAN covered the speeches, no one else. PBS was in second place, and these are public networks, not private and corporate owned.
Kerry DID NOT have "four nights of speeches devoted to building him up." He had four nights of republicans sitting squarely in the middle of the democratic convention screening the speeches, and ensuring that any positive effect of the few speeches aired was negated by their right-wing commentary. The guests, sometimes split between democrats and republicans, gave the republicans a huge advantage because when you put a republican anchor with a republican guest and a democratic guest, the ratio, at a minimum, is two to one. A democratic convention should have NOT ONE republican in sight. This was not the time for republican commentary, or a republican response. It's a time when the democrats should have had the floor to themselves. The republicans get their chance next month.
This is a media scandal of HUGE proportions, and they are berating themselves royally for doing it. This all leads up to "being fair" to Bush at the republican convention. With hardly a democrat in sight, they'll tone down the rhetoric and air the vast majority of the speeches, with positive comments afterwards. After all, they can't be rude again, now can they?
It is so FRUSTRATING that the democrats are letting this pass. When they have the rare opportunity to point out what happened, they don't take it.
