aaggghhh cnn!!

Yesterday was primary election day here in Kentucky. Most of the rest of the country has already spoken, and, for the most part, the people have decided that either John McCain or Barack Obama will be our next president. You never know though. Hillary Clinton won big in the Bluegrass State, and the never-stop-jabbering mouth pieces at CNN have been giving us lots of grief for it.

Yesterday was also Oregon's primary election day. Well, sorta. Out there you mail your ballot in or drop it off with the clerk. Yesterday was the deadline. Senator Obama won that race, and according to CNN's expert talkers, it is because the people in Oregon are smarter, wealthier and more open minded than the backwoods hicks in Kentucky. Not only do the folks at CNN believe it, they repeated it over and over and over again all night last night and again this morning.

I work at the state capitol. The CNN Express bus has been parked out in front of this beautiful building for a week now. They've been doing live reports and using our capitol dome as the backdrop. They've had plenty of time to get acquainted with some of the fine people who live and work in this artsy, educated town. But they didn't bother to get to know anyone while they were here.

Instead, on election day the CNN crew loaded up and travelled at least three hours into one of the most remote and impoverished areas of our state to ask those folks who they voted for or why they didn't vote at all. So, instead of seeing one of our many well spoken and pleasantly presented citizens on national television explaining why they intelligently decided to cast their vote the way they did, we saw a well intentioned but very stereotypical mountain lady telling a camera that "a woman's place is in the home and I ain't about to vote for no black man."

The people who live in rural Kentucky are good, decent people. They shouldn't be ignored and we shouldn't pretend they don't exist. Their voice is as important as anyone else's. But the portrait of Kentucky that CNN is trying to paint is simply not accurate. When there were tens of thousands of reasonable, articulate people to talk to about something as important as the presidential election, they went out of their way to find and air footage of their version of a hillbilly. Then the reporter went on to describe Kentucky as an uneducated, poor, backwoods, bigoted state. When it was tossed back to the studio the "experts" there continued their insults. I was offended.

I've been around politics and the media long enough to understand that the news agencies tell you what they want you to know. They often have information or facts that may change the texture or direction of a story. But if it doesn't serve their purpose or advance their agenda you'll never see or hear it.

CNN decided they wanted to make Senator Obama's supporters look more capable than Senator Clinton's. To make their point they took advantage of a whole state full of good people and made all of us look ignorant and racist. If that's the way they want to do business we're forced to wonder what else they've distorted along the way.