Notes on Politics: Jon Stewart, Anthony Weiner & Bill Clinton; Plus Local News on Decline

'The Wangover’

How is it possible to laugh at this sad, sad Weinter-Gate situation that's so patently and bizarrely insane?

Watch The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart take a stab at what his staff is calling, “The Wangover,” and place the hullabaloo into its surreal context. (Note: Stewart was once a quasi-roommate of Rep. Anthony Weiner's, actually Stewart shared an apartment with Weiner’s then-girlfriend.)

Measly Local News Coverage = More Gov’t Power, Potential Abuses

On a more serious note . . . When I was but a mere cub newspaper reporter and was assigned to cover a small town, I was given this advice: Get to know the people who work in the various departments in the town, particularly the administrative assistants, back then called secretaries. So I routinely checked in with departments and chatted folks up. I made sure to find out what happened at all the public meetings the boards/departments had if I hadn’t been able to attend them in person. In essence, I covered any given town to which I had been assigned, like the proverbial blanket.

That’s no longer the case for newspaper reporters as their staffs shrink and resources are pulled away from local newsgathering. Plus, many local newspapers have shied away from having their reporters write stories about government meetings because they don’t think it makes for interesting reading in a hyper-competitive, 24/7 media landscape.

The result? People don’t necessarily know what the heck is going on inside Town Hall any more. Local elections get barely any coverage and information about candidates for elected offices is sparse while local newspapers’ space for news stories contracts. We, the voters, are left largely in the dark as to what our local elected officials are doing. Think about what happened in the city of Bell, California where, until a Los Angeles Times story last year, its city officials were receiving oversized salaries, like $100,000/year for part-time City Council positions and nearly $800,000 for the city manager. And this was in “one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County,” the Times reported. If a local news reporter had been covering that city on a regular basis -- scouring proposed municipal budgets and attending budget hearings like reporters used to do -- the public outrage about what officials were proposing would've likely prevented those salaries from being approved in the first place.

Which brings us to a new study from the Federal Communications Commission which found, “Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged,” the New York Times reported.
The paper quoted the study’s author as saying, “The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism – going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy – is in some cases at risk at the local level.” The FCC report cited the Bell, California case as an example of what happens when regular local reporting is cut.

I heartily concur that the dearth of local reporting will result in an ill-informed electorate and unchecked government power. Maybe folks like a local blogger I know -- who covers her hometown much more thoroughly and in depth than the local newspapers -- will step in and do the job that trained journalists used to do: Providing updates on what’s transpiring at Town Hall.

Weiner-Gate: Color Me Disgusted

This whole Weiner-Gate thing is gross, immature and disgusting. A 46-year-old CONGRESSMAN who is considered a firebrand liberal member of his party – therefore he garners lots of media attention for his partisan antics – should know better then to take and send lewd photos of himself to people he’s never met on the internet. (New X-rated photos are now making the rounds.) New York U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner certainly shouldn’t be engaging in that kind of thing now that he’s a married man. He only got married last July for God’s sake, it’s not like there’s been time for the romance to fade from the marriage.

But now we learn, courtesy of the New York Times, that his 35-year-old wife is pregnant. If this was a TV drama, we'd be calling BS right about now.

While Weiner claims he never “physically” cheated on his wife, he has cheated on her emotionally and has thoroughly humiliated her while she is carrying his child. To me, the fact that his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, is pregnant makes this whole stew of ugly even uglier. Seriously. You’d think that a man who goes on television for a living as a politician who's pushing an agenda, who’s still a newlywed, who is expecting his first child with his new bride would know better than this.



What a cad, a cad who won’t resign his office like other well known politician cads (*cough* Bill Clinton, John Edwards *cough*) who had no shame and who humiliated their spouses and families.


Speaking of a cad who actually DID resign . . . former New York Governor Eliot “Client Number 9” Spitzer had the temerity to express sympathy for what Weiner’s going through, saying it’s a “torment like virtually no other.” Dude, try being married to the source of that torment, the one who brought the torment raining down upon the house. For the perp who created the situation, who created the reason for said "torment," no sympathy. Zip.

Which brings me to this pet peeve of mine as a journalist: Eliot Spitzer has no business anchoring a news program on CNN. But since CNN apparently has no problem with putting this guy on the air, perhaps Weiner could resign his office and join Spitzer as a co-host . . .

Notes on Pop Culture/Politics: 'Breaking Dawn' Trailer, 'The Killing' & Weiner-Gate

Tags: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

I Got Your Breaking Dawn Trailer Right Here

My resident Twilight fan – my 12-year-old daughter – was thrilled to watch this brand, spankin’ new promo for the first part of Breaking Dawn. Wonder how graphic the brutal pregnancy and birth will be . . . Wonder if she can handle watching this movie . . .



The Killing Confounds

Did ya catch the recent episode of The Killing? The one that spent the entire time focused on Sarah Linden looking for her temporarily missing 13-year-old/wanna-be delinquent son while being carted around Seattle by her partner Stephen Holder? Strange and out of the norm for this series, eh?

Well let me tell you, I wasn’t a big fan of this installment. I wanted more in the way of clues to the murder’s identity, seeing as though there are now only two more episodes left, not an episode on a tangent. I reviewed it for CliqueClack TV.


Weiner-Gate

I hardly know what to say about this pathetic, ridiculous story about the married, fortysomething New York Congressman who was stupid enough to take and send lewd photos of himself to various women, then lied about it only to have to face the press and issue a mea culpa in front of a bank of news cameras just like the many horny male politicians who were caught with their pants down before him, like (just to name a few) Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford and John Edwards. Have none of these men learned anything?

It’s just preposterous that, in this age of 24/7 media, U.S. Rep. Weiner would even think that these images would never go public.

Among the interesting post-mortems, this one from Jezebel saying things like this from male pols are “rooted in male narcissism.” I think that goes without saying.

Can't wait to see what the late night comedians do with this . . .