Monday, July 16, 2007

The Press vs. The People

I love this post by Glenn Greenwald. In it, he shows just how far removed the press is in regards to what the American people think by looking at recent poll results on a whole host of different issues. In short, the American people want greater oversight of the Bush Administration, an end to the war in Iraq and widely disagree with the Scooter Libby commutation. Yet, according to the Beltway press, all of these are thought to be fringe opinions.

He also points out something that is quite important- in regards to the current disparity between the press and the people. Pundits have been keen to point out that the approval ratings for Congress are very low which, they believe, shows that the American people want to see an end to partisan squabbles. The numbers, however, don't bear this point out. The reason for the low approval ratings is that Democrats are not happy with the lack of partisanship as nearly 50% of all Democrats disapprove of the job Congress is doing. We want our leaders in Congress to show some spine and not roll over when the Republicans start whining. We want them to fight back.

1 comment:

Disco said...

This has a similar theme to a post I was going to make, in regards to the Congress's low poll numbers. In my mind, In my opinion, the numbers are low because of Congress's inaction on 1] failure to substantially move towards redeployment in Iraq, 2] failure to move towards Impeachment, or 3] both issues.