Reply #138: hehe.. I can’t make it through the preamble.. that link you gave..

[Usrename]

holy pantload, OTOH!!!

This thing had tears running down my face it’s so hilarious!

I’ve highlighted the only true phrase in bold for you to ponder!

”On Election Day 2000, television news organizations staged a collective drag race
on the crowded highway of democracy, recklessly endangering the electoral process, the
political life of the country, and their own credibility, all for reasons that may be
conceptually flawed and commercially questionable.

Their excessive speed, combined with an overconfidence in experts and a reliance
on increasingly dubious polls, produced a powerful collision between the public interest
and the private competitive interests of the television news operations and the
corporations that own them.

Their hyper-competition stemmed from a foolish attempt to beat their rivals to the
finish line in calling state-by-state winners in the presidential election, foolish because
few in the crowd knew then or know now which network got the checkered flag most
often. Foolish because each network funded its competitor’s work. Foolish, too, because
their haste led to two mistaken calls in the state that turned out to hold the key to the
outcome of the election. All, in turn, played an important role in creating the ensuing
climate of rancor and bitterness."

<snip>

That phrase in bold, when taken by itself, does speak volumes. Yeah, that part really did happen.

But this last sentence is just so over the top I almost soiled my pants when I read it.

"Those calls and their retractions constituted a news disaster that damaged
democracy and journalism.”

Yeah, sure.

Like the Supreme Court of the United States ruling that it is unconstitutional to count legally cast votes or the media’s failure to explain this fact in no way damaged democracy and journalism.

Thanks for the hoot. I’ll try to look at the rest of it if I can recover from the fits of hysteria. No joke. That’s a hoot.