With Clinton / Obama Coming to Pennsylvania, Will Journalists Finally Ask the Real Questions?

Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less which of the Democratic Presidential candidates was first to come out against the Iraq War. That was a whole other time, a whole other economy and has virtually nothing to do with the challenges the incoming President will face in 2009.

I’m also bored to distraction with the continuing discussion on the networks about which of the candidates acquitted themselves most favorably on “Saturday Night Live.” Somehow, however, the quality of coverage of the election has dropped to that level – ranging from the irrelevant to the downright insulting.

To tell you the truth, I’ve grown impatient with the overall line of questioning by the “multimillionaire broadcasters” on the network news shows and in the debates, to date.

But, maybe it really is hard to relate to the country’s “bread and butter issues” when your annual salary is 311 times larger than the median U.S. family household income, as is the case with Katie Couric, who takes home $15 million each year from her job at CBS TV.

Maybe, it’s also not the fault of ABC’s Diane Sawyer ($12 million a year) or Charles Gibson ($8 million annually), or CNN’s Anderson Cooper ($5 million), or even MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, former ESPN anchor and a relative newcomer to “serious” news coverage who, himself, now earns $4 million per annum.

When you’re making that kind of money, when you’re living each day in that kind of world, maybe the esoteric and hypothetical questions developed for you by your staff, during what is, arguably, one of the most critically vulnerable periods in U.S. history, do make sense, after all.

My hope is that when the candidates finally arrive in Pennsylvania, and especially in its most populous and diverse city, Philadelphia, that they start describing in detail the steps we need to take as a nation to stage a much-needed social and economic recovery.

For example, when do we start asking Obama and Clinton what they really plan to do about the fact that premium gas at the pump is already being sold for about $5.00 a gallon in certain California stations? When do we ask them if it still makes sense for this country, even in the midst of a fundamentally dysfunctional, free-market economy, to inject some logical, goal-oriented, centrally-planned components into to the national recovery plan?

When do we ask whether it’s time, yet, for the country to actually have a plan for how many jobs we need to create, here, rather than just shrugging our national shoulders, and sitting idly by while our largest publicly traded companies continue to ship hundreds of thousands of significant employment opportunities overseas?

When do we move away from the elitist folly of having an almost singular focus on the so-called “knowledge economy?”

Do the two senators think that there may be a connection between the country losing 85,000 jobs since the beginning of the year and the fact that one million American homes are now in foreclosure? What would they do about those two related issues if they were fortunate enough to be elected president, and what do they recommend we do right now?

Have we noticed that the emerging economies that are “kicking our globally dependent butts,” are based in countries, where people don’t scoff at factory work or manual labor? Those are the same countries by the way, that sell us our flat-screen t.v.’s, our computers, our cars, our pharmaceuticals, our suits, our shirts and 80 percent of everything we buy from Wal-Mart?

Have we noticed that we’re now dependent on foreign manufacturers to build even the planes we need to equip our own armed services? When will one of the big network interviewers get around to asking pointed questions about why our nation has condoned a dangerously escalating, educational and economic disparity between blacks and whites in this country? In that regard, when will the candidates be asked if it continues to make sense to have a substantial percentage of the 40 million blacks in this country (13% of the total population) living on the economic margins and largely unable to contribute to the economic growth of the country, as a whole?

When will media ask Barack and Hillary whether the interests of the handgun industry and its political front, the NRA, outweigh those of the 30,000 Americans who die each year from firearms-related injuries? That number, by the way, compares to the 3300 Americans who have died in combat in Iraq since 2003. If the candidates are “on each other’s cases” about U.S. deaths in Iraq, why no semblance of outrage about deaths related to our out-of-control firearms industry?

When will they ask the two senators if they agree with the strategy that has led to the U.S. having more of its citizens in prison than China, even though we have about 25 percent of China’s population?

When will one of the "broadcast multimillionaires” develop the “guts” to inquire about the true role of the banking industry in the country’s current financial services malaise? It really has been “lazy journalism” that has allowed the financial institutions to get away with implying that the “subprime mortgage crisis” occurred because the bankers were just trying to be “good citizens” by permitting “minorities and those with poor credit” to experience the joys of homeownership. If reporters would dig just a little deeper they would find that poor lending practices across all banking product lines, excessive customer fees, usuriously high interest rates, and extraordinarily high executive management bonuses are what really caused the banking crisis. What do the two Democratic candidates plan to do about what appears to be an absolute lack of effective banking industry oversight on behalf of consumers? “Subprime” appears to be just the “tip of the iceberg.” Do they agree?

Maybe these questions won’t be asked because the networks are entirely too closely tied to, and invested in, the financial markets that have benefited, in the short run, by the last 15 years of poor financial and investment management?

Isn’t it silly to continue to think, with the whole litany of fundamental economic issues facing our country, that poor Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve Bank can fix it all by announcing even more interest rate decreases? What do Senators Clinton and Obama plan to do about any of that and what might they suggest as an alternative?

Perhaps, the bigger and more important unasked question is why the current President, who was broadly supported by the broadcast networks in both of his presidential election campaigns, isn’t being asked to do anything at all about most of these issues, despite the fact that he has 10 months left in his term.

Can we afford to wait until 2009 to have these matters addressed, to have our questions answered and a new national economic model implemented?

With Pennsylvania now clearly in the national spotlight, who will be first to ask the real questions and finally get the answers we need to put our economy back on track and to choose the next president?

Will the real journalists please stand up?

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