Has the media been unfair in criticizing Vice President Biden over swine flu remarks?

Yes

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by Andrew Karr

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The news media today is rarely fair about anything especially when it comes to someone as polarizing and public as the Vice-President of the United States. Vice President Joe Biden has been known as a "talker". It is hardly news to show him talking.

Todays major news media has one thing in mind "ratings". Sound clips are the best way to show your audience a portion of the news. Unfortunately, the clips and the following analysis are nothing more than neon lights trying to get your attention. Something like you would see at a bar on the strip in Las Vegas.

The big news networks look very familiar to the big casinos on the Las Vegas strip. They have more flashing lights, commercials, and advertisements than Disneyland. Las Vegas spends millions of dollars so you can't tell the difference between day and night. Large media has picked up on this marketing tool, they show the same show twice in a few hours. Regurgitating the same news over and over again.

After a story makes it to the water cooler the following morning you can bet you will see followups on that newscast every day for a week. Some justify this small scope news cycle by stating they report on the news people want to see. It is more plausible to me they are just keeping budgets as low as possible and profits as high as possible.

A perfect example of low budget manufactured news is the reporting done on Joe Biden. There is no way anyone could consider the "coverage" of Joe Biden as fair. I consider myself to be a news junkie and I haven't seen the question Joe Biden was answering yet. All I have seen is the edited version which picks up Vice President Biden half way through one of his all to familiar long winded responses. Then when there is a correction posted by the Vice President's office the media uses that release to justify the earlier reporting. If the media would have reported the news no correction would have been needed.

News programs repeatedly claim they are reporting on a story. More often though, their reporting is advertised and teased constantly for days. They turn a news worthy event into an advertising ploy for their prime time "news" broadcasts. Vice President Joe Biden and his remarks regarding the swine flu were considered golden footage to the media. They used it as an advertising tool and manufactured a story from thin air.

Big media is continuing to marginalize itself. It is a shame newspapers are failing but, if big tv media continues to report on manufactured news from biased points of view they too will be put out of business by unpaid bloggers who have more credibility and what seems to be a bigger budget.

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