WFTV-Channel 9’s Barbara West conducted a satellite interview with Sen. Joe Biden on Thursday. A friend says it’s some of the best entertainment he’s seen recently. What do you think?
West wondered about Sen. Barack Obama’s comment, to Joe the Plumber, about spreading the wealth. She quoted Karl Marx and asked how Obama isn’t being a Marxist with the “spreading the wealth” comment.
“Are you joking?” said Biden, who is Obama’s running mate. “No,” West said.
West later asked Biden about his comments that Obama could be tested early on as president. She wondered if the Delaware senator was saying America’s days as the world’s leading power were over.
“I don’t know who’s writing your questions,” Biden shot back.
Biden so disliked West’s line of questioning that the Obama campaign canceled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the candidate’s wife.
“This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election,” wrote Laura K. McGinnis, Central Florida communications director for the Obama campaign. McGinnis said the Biden cancellation was “a result of her husband’s experience yesterday during the satellite interview with Barbara West.”Here’s a link to the interview: http://www.wftv.com/video/17790025/index.html.
WFTV news director Bob Jordan said, “When you get a shot to ask these candidates, you want to make the most of it. They usually give you five minutes.”
Jordan said political campaigns in general pick and choose the stations they like. And stations often pose softball questions during the satellite interviews.
“Mr. Biden didn’t like the questions,” Jordan said. “We choose not to ask softball questions.”
1) But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of basic issues of political and economic justice in this society and to that extent, as radical as people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasnt that radical.
2) You know, maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know I am not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts.
3) So I think that, although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally, you know I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.
4) And how do we actually create equal schools and equal educational opportunity? Well, the court in a case called San Antonio v Rodriguez, in the early 70s, basically slaps those kinds of claims down and says, you know, that we as a court have no power to examine issues of redistribution and wealth inequalities.
The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game — with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer,” because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.


