[THS] !!! The Media's Billion Dollar Ad for Evan Bayh

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24746.htm

The Media`s Billion Dollar Ad for Evan Bayh

By Cenk Uygur

February 17, 2010 "Daily Kos" -- The mainstream media has been giving Evan Bayh a
big fat sloppy kiss for the last 24 hours. Every single story is about how moderate and
centrist and independent he is. Golly gee willikers, Evan Bayh is such a pure and
innocent person and he just couldn't take the corruption of Congress anymore. He
was so fed up with the partisanship and like any great man decided he must strike
out on his own and leave DC.

Come on, are these people this naïve or do they have a stake in this? Do you really
think Evan Bayh only has pure motivations and was the last good man in
Washington. This is absolutely absurd and on many fronts the exact opposite of the
truth. No one made a deal with corporate lobbyists faster than Evan Bayh did. He
wasn't sick of the problems of DC, he was the problem of DC.

Bayh masked his craven capitulation to corporate lobbyists with a veneer of
bipartisanship and moderation. If he sold out to enough special interests, he could
claim that he was on both sides. But the one side he was never against was business
interests that fed him his campaign cash.

So, he is a typical fake politician; I get that and I can live with it. What bothers me is
how the media plays along. They have been running a giant ad for Evan Bayh's
future political career or future lobbying career over the last couple of days. There is
never a skeptical story about how Evan Bayh might be retiring to cash in on lobbyist
money. And for those of you not familiar with the process - and apparently that's the
entire DC media - the most powerful tool lobbyists have is the implied bribe that
politicians get at the end of their career. If you play ball and do what you've been
told, you're nearly guaranteed a multi-million dollar payoff at the end. Look at Tom
Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Billy Tauzin, Dick Armey. This list goes on and on. Everybody
gets rich, oh right, except the American people.

Yet, not one knucklehead on TV has suggested that Bayh might be leaving to take
the money. Instead they paint him as this hero of bipartisanship and moderation. It's
a giant ad for Bayh. If he wanted to buy this much positive media coverage in the
form of commercials, he'd have to spend nearly a billion dollars on every station in
the country. Instead, the corporate media does him this favor as a going away
present. And my guess is there will be nary a word when he resurfaces as a multi-
million dollar corporate lobbyist in a little while. And then if he resurfaces in politics
later, again the mention of his corporate ties will be glorified as the moves of a savvy
businessman and the so-called moderate will ride back into town as a hero.

If they're not doing this on purpose, then they are hideously misinformed about the
process and grossly negligent in reporting the real facts of Washington. If they are
doing it on purpose (not the television actors posing as news anchors, they have
almost no idea, but the producers and executives that make decisions on news
coverage), then we're all screwed. Everything is an illusion meant to mask the reality
of corporate dominance over DC. If you play ball, you're a hero. If you don't, you're a
fringe outsider (otherwise known to the rest of us as a real American). Corporate
robots in the media supporting corporate robots in politics. I don't know why I ever
get surprised by any of this.