Reactor Flashback

I had a purely political blog back during the election season last year for kansan.com. It was for an opinion writing class I was taking at the time, and was a lot of fun. I wrote a lot about the issues during the election, issues elsewhere in the world, what my thoughts as a conservative in an incredibly liberal-land were (I've heard KU called the Berkeley of the Midwest), and how I thought we as American citizens should have reacted.

Needless to say, a lot of my posts went on to be severely criticized. I was called an idiot, a bad journalist, and even a racist at one point.

I'll post a few of my old posts here on the new Reactor. It's interesting to see my opinions back then, how much they've changed, how much they haven't changed, and what people were saying.

So here, from September 10, 2008, is my first Reactor blog post, "Who Watches The Watchmen?"

I've attached the comments, but sadly my own comments answering some questions were lost.

Enjoy, and as always, tell me what you think.

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Welcome to the Reactor. I am a conservative in a liberal land, a Republican where Republicans fear to tread. In this blog I will present a conservative reaction to the events in our world.
Ahh, election season. That magical time of every four years when people hate other people for no apparent reason at all and the media tries to play the middle of the field.
Believe me, I'm the last person who would want to criticize the media. I am part of the media and I hate it when the media is accused of spinning everything and just out to screw with us. People with no experience in the field assume they know everything about how the news process works and attack it for being one-sided.
Usually I disagree with them.
Now that I'm watching the current election coverage, I begin to see what those angry people are talking about.
The news seems to be hailing one particular candidate as the savior of our country, able to magically fix all the wrongs in this world. The news seems to be tilted towards covering everything that candidate does and only a little of what the other one does.
When I did I normal Google search for McCain, 86,600,000 hits came up. When I did the same one for Obama, 161,000,000 hits came up. Maybe he's just more popular.
But when I did a Google News search, 351,174 for McCain and 380,343 for Obama came up.
30,000 hits is nothing, right?
On CNN.com, 15,700,000 popped up for McCain and 27,000,000 appeared for Obama.
Hmm. 11 million hit difference now.
This may seem like a simple fluke, but in reality, it is a sign of something more. The media is obviously leaning towards Obama as a favorite. The coverage of him and his campaign coverage is more prominent, and has been going on for far longer than the coverage of Republican hopefuls before McCain stepped up.
Every time you turn on the TV it's talking more and more about how awesome Obama is and how he's going to single-handedly save America. I was listening to the radio, and on a commercial for some Rock The Vote thing (a decidedly BIPARTISAN thing, mind you), they used a clip from an Obama speech. The clip? Something along the lines of this:
"And in November, the name George W. Bush will not be on the ballot!" *big cheer*
Don't even get me started on the ridiculousness of that statement. That's a whole other blog entry. The fact is, the media is all but ENDORSING Barack Obama. Sure newspapers do it all the time, but what happens if CNN, FOX, MSNBC, heck, even the BBC endorses a candidate?
In other words, the media's credibility is going severely downhill. If a network endorses a candidate, which I don't see as too far away at this point, then where will people get their balanced viewpoints? I realize they don't exist from any one source, but a conglomeration of unaffiliated sources provide the American people with the big picture. With the way the media is heading this election, what is the big picture?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who watches the Watchmen?