Why the Media is Failing

So apparently Mitt Romney has won the Michigan primaries. sigh

From 1996 until 2007, I lived in Boston...capital of Massachusetts. From 2003 to 2007, Romney was Governor of Massachusetts. Massachusetts is often referred to as not just a "Blue State", but the "Bluest State"...mostly because of the whole gay marriage thing, but it is generally a pretty liberal state, even if Bush got 37% of the vote in 2004 there.

So as you might imagine, Romney didn't exactly win the gubernatorial race by being a right wing "Christian" conservative. He won it essentially by saying he was a centrist and by support for abortion rights, gay rights, and by "raising taxes" (technically it's jacking the fees, but if you have to pay it either way, does it matter). It didn't hurt that his opponent was Shannon O'Brien (who?)

Now for us Bostonians, and Massachusetts denizens as a whole, from day one we all knew Romney was a slick-haired used-car salesman who would say and do anything to get elected so he could springboard from Beacon Hill to the US Presidency. He muscled sitting (and "Acting") Governor Jane Swift, also a Republican, out of the way so he could run. Pretty nasty stuff. And he proceeded to spend the next four years putting style way the hell over substance on everything from gay marriage to the Big Dig. This man would say ANYTHING he wanted to win whatever battle he was fighting at the moment, no matter how blatantly it contradicted anything he'd said before. See folks, flip-flopping isn't only a Democrat thing when it comes to major Massachusetts politicians.

So when Romney announced he was running for Prez, most of us merely groaned and wondered why he waited as long as he did to officially announce it since he'd essentially been telling us since January of 2003, and shouting it since 2005 in his constant attacks on Massachusetts while still Governor (classy, Mitt)

Yet while I know all this as a matter of routine, my co-worker...a radio news reporter here in upstate New York...tells me that generally he didn't know anything about Romney until about six or eight months ago when the national media started picking up on him, and even now knows virtually nothing about his record as a Massachusetts politician; much less what most Massachusetts residents actually think of Romney. Namely, that he sucked so bad that his hand-picked successor (Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey) got her ass whipped by a political neophyte who's proven very inept in office.

So why the hell isn't Romney's record, or lack thereof, being dissected on the national stage? Why aren't news organizations showing how Mitt's "business leadership" killed a woman through pathetic mismanagement. Why hasn't the media shown that you can't trust a word Mitt says??

sigh I suppose this is true of all Presidential contenders. I imagine Obama's foes in Illinois are shaking their heads about his success and wondering how the country doesn't know about X, Y or Z. Perhaps that's why Hillary gets such vitriol; she's already been in the White House for eight years; we know exactly what she'll do in there and it scares the crap out of most of us. With everyone else, we can tell ourselves comforting little white lies because we don't know them well enough to know better.