Terry Cowgill

Tuesday’s Random Thoughts

August 29, 2006 on 1:39 pm | In Main, Media, National |

I just heard on Air America that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has challenged President Bush to a one-on-one televised debate.

“The debate should be uncensored in order for the American people to be able to listen to what we say,” Ahmadinejad was quoted by the BBC as saying.

Great, I thought, two arrogant politicians with low approval ratings who can’t speak English trying to win the hearts and minds of Americans fed up with escalating violence in the Middle East. Bush vs Ahmadinejad — uncut. You can’t make this stuff up.

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There is a scathing piece today in the Washington Post by media critic Howard Kurtz on coverage of the misadventures of confessed JonBenet Ramsey killer John Mark Karr. Here’s how he starts off:

Will every anchor, correspondent and producer who shamelessly hyped the John Mark Karr story now apologize for taking the country for a ride?

Don’t hold your breath.

This was such a sham, from the opening moments, that it instantly goes down with the greatest media embarrassments in modern history.

Gee, Howie, tell us how you really feel. Sure, it is an embarrassment in the sense that there was inordinate attention focused on a guy with a highly suspect background. And there were plenty of breathless reports that the real killer had been found. But let’s not get carried away. This doesn’t even come close to the Jayson Blair scandal, for example.

It’s Tuesday and with deadlines looming I don’t have time to troll the Web for examples, but I recall a fair amount of skepticism in the mainstream media about this from the time Karr was paraded in front of the press at a Bangkok police station.

In fact, that whole scene reminded me of Dallas Police headquarters the day after President Kennedy was murdered. A suspect is hustled by police down a hallway and allowed to field questions from the press. I half expected to see a fedora-clad John Ramsey jump out and fill Karr’s belly full of lead.

But I digress. My recollection is that there were early indications, all reported in the MSM, that this guy’s story didn’t add up. He told Thai authorities he had picked up JonBenet up from school the day of the murder (which would have been Dec. 25 or 26); as Kurtz himself wrote, Karr’s ex-wife, who said she couldn’t stand the guy, grudgingly told investigators she was with Karr in Alabama that Christmas.

And let’s face it, if someone surfaces who confesses to a high-profile crime like this, then it’s big news, even if his story is riddled with holes. Let’s just hope we never have to hear the words John Mark Karr again.

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Word is that John Kerry has come out and claimed that Kenneth Blackwell, the black Republican Ohio secretary of state, used the power of his office to suppress Democratic turnout, resulting in Kerry’s loss to Bush in 2004.

If the claims have any merit — and they have been widely discredited up to this point — then they should be investigated. But if he wants to run for president again, Kerry should spend his time trying to figure out how to connect with the working class voters he needs in order to get to the Oval Office.

Democrats looking to win seats in Congress this year and the White House in 2008 should spend whatever time and effort it takes to find issues that will resonate. Then they need to communicate them in a way that’s understandable [hint: as I have written before, Wal-Mart bashing won’t work]. Otherwise they are missing one heck of an opportunity. As James Carville himself was quoted in The QandO Blog:

“We have to go back to 1974 [during Watergate] to find such a favorable environment,” said Carville, who ran Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. “If we can’t win in this environment, we have to question the whole premise of the party.”