The Idocy of National Unity

Marty Kaplan / HuffPo

Dear Presidential Candidates:

The men and women of the media are not your friends.

They work for a big business, whose oxygen is attention. They live or die on grabbing and holding audiences. To stay in business, they need combat, conflict, heat, meat, flip-flops, gotchas, losers, boozers, hairpin turns, heroes with feet of clay, Rockys, Quixotes, cliffhangers, firewalkers, comebacks, kickbacks, zingers, 'wingers.

And yet at the same time the media root for and egg on mudwrestling and foodfighting, what they say they want is a cathedral -- bipartisanship, consensus, a Serious Debate on The Issues, Bringing America Together.

Boy, is that a sucker punch. The truth is, they think that stuff is really b-o-r-i-n-g. No combat = no attention. If you want a case study of the media's ennui with unity, look at how they've covered Bush for the past four years. The country has never been more united in opposing him and his policies; words like "idiot" and "incompetent" are what come to mind first when 70-plus percent of the country think of him, which is as close to a landslide as America ever gets. Yet from the coverage Bush and the Republicans receive, you'd think that his opposition resides in a wild-eyed fringe.

The rest after the click ...