{"id":157,"date":"2012-03-25T22:05:18","date_gmt":"2012-03-25T22:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/?p=157"},"modified":"2012-03-25T22:05:18","modified_gmt":"2012-03-25T22:05:18","slug":"the-stupid-media-sometimes-a-guy-just-wants-to-scream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/?p=157","title":{"rendered":"The Stupid Media, Sometimes a Guy Just Wants to Scream"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Quite often, really.\u00a0 Former Vice President Dick Cheney recently received a heart transplant after a 20 month wait.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not like he went to the head of the line, now is it?\u00a0 So what angle does ABC News want to play?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Politics\/dick-cheney-heart-transplant\/story?id=15998479\">Is Dick Cheney Too Old for a Heart Transplant?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Translated, it means should Republicans receive heart transplants since they don&#8217;t have them anyway.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll guarantee that if an aging Democrat party member received one, the media would be all gushy about it and never question if he or she were too old.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll also guarantee that if a younger Republican received one, they&#8217;d just come up with another question asking if he or she should have received it.<\/p>\n<p>This article is stupider than most because it answers the question in the third paragraph, saying that people Cheney&#8217;s age do get them.\u00a0 But wait, it gets stupider than that.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Experts differ on whether the 20-month wait is longer than normal.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Twenty months, as an outpatient, [is] not [an] unusually long wait,&#8221; Dr. Marrick Kukin, director of heart failure at St. Lukes Roosevelt in New York said.<\/p>\n<p>But Dr. Keith Aaronson, medical director of the heart failure program at the University of Michigan said 20 months &#8220;is a relatively long waiting time for an LVAD recipient to wait for a heart transplant.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now how useless is this?\u00a0 About as useless as Joe Biden, except Biden supplies entertainment value.\u00a0 Theoretically, news stories should inform people, but presenting two different claims when there is a definitive answer to the question wastes space, energy, and isn&#8217;t very green.\u00a0 So which is it?\u00a0 A long wait, or a normal wait?\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know, but there is an answer and a reporter should know how to find it.\u00a0 I do, however, have a theory that might explain why this ambiguity exists.<\/p>\n<p>The reporter contacted Dr. Aaronson first and didn&#8217;t want to report that Dick Cheney waited a long time.\u00a0 It would have looked far better to report that he didn&#8217;t wait long at all, then interview a distressed liberal-approved victim group mother of a child waiting for a new heart.\u00a0 That one&#8217;s coming, mark my words.\u00a0 The reporter, not liking the answer then contacted more doctors hoping to find one that would say it was a short wait.\u00a0 The best the reporter could come up with was Dr. Kukin, who said it wasn&#8217;t unusually long.\u00a0 Sometimes you just don&#8217;t get dealt the hand you want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Quite often, really.\u00a0 Former Vice President Dick Cheney recently received a heart transplant after a 20 month wait.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not like he went to the head of the line, now is it?\u00a0 So what angle does ABC News want to &hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/?p=157\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mainstream-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162,"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions\/162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.clw54.com\/blog\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}