Eenshallahtohr?” (Hebrew for plumber), thinks a member of the Israeli Defense Force in Gaza as he stares, puzzled, at Pajama Media war correspondent Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, more popularly known as “Joe the Plumber.”
For those of you who have been living under a rock since October 2008, John McCain made Joe, who is not even a registered plumber, and he is now in Gaza, attempting to give the world a balanced view of the war against Hamas.
“I liked back in World War I and World War II, when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for them. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to down soldiers — our American soldiers, our Israeli soldiers. I think media should be abolished from reporting. You know, war’s hell, and if you’re gonna sit there and say ‘Well look at this atrocity’ — well you don’t know the full story behind it half the time. So I think the media should have no business in it,” said Joe in the New York Times.
This is my article from the George Street Observer at the College of Charleston. It was published on January 20th, 2009.
Clearly, based on his statement in the Times, Joe has no problem with an uninformed American public. Joe is neither a columnist nor a reporter and shouldn’t be treated as such.
The following interview can be found in the Huffington Post, in which Joe interrogates an Israeli reporter and subsequently confirms his inability to perform responsible journalism.
JOE: The story here is people are being killed and the media's slanting it and trying to make it Hamas is, uh, as far as, that Israel's being bad. Do you believe Israel is bad?
REPORTER: Do I believe it?
JOE: Yeah, do you?!
REPORTER: I'm Israeli, so...
JOE: So answer the question!
REPORTER: No, I don't think Israel is bad.
JOE: Do you think Israel has every right to protect itself?
REPORTER: Yeah. [pause]
JOE: You do?!
REPORTER: Yeah.
JOE: Have you said that on air?
REPORTER: I'm just a reporter.
Now how in the world is it that Joe the Plumber, the Republicans “beloved hero,” is supposed to give a balanced view of the war in Gaza? Recall, this is the man who claimed that, “being a Christian I'm pretty well protected by God I believe,” to reporters in Gaza about how safe he felt in the war zone.
It is shameful that real journalists, with education and training, are having to compete for the attention of American information seekers with a man who lacks a plumbing certification let alone a bachelor’s degree in an applicable field.
If “the West” is going to learn anything from this war, it needs to be from true media sources, not a man who thinks he knows all and maintains a skill set revolving around unclogging toilets.
There is nothing wrong with being a plumber; however, the New York Times, CNN, The LA Times and Fox News would certainly never employ Joe Wurzelbacher as a war correspondent and with good reason.
The country has given Joe the Plumber much beyond 15 minutes of fame and it is time to let him be forgotten. Joe is not a genius, a savior, a war correspondent or even a real plumber. He is an average guy who is one of the most inappropriate choices that any journalistic entity, even a small blog, could choose to get information from about the war in Gaza.
The media is here to inform, and to give that duty to someone as dimwitted and uneducated as Joe is truly disheartening.
Frankly, next time there is a need for information from Gaza, it may be a better investment to send a cat or dog, because barking is the best you expect to get from Joe.
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I am a news junky and I read incredibly stupid, il-informed, poorly researched and blatently slanted stuff in the news every day. Most of what passes for news is garbage.
I am particularly interested in the subject of illegal immigration and I am widely read and very knowlegeable on that topic so I know when I'm being fed al line of bullshit. What passes for news on that topic for the most part would be better described as propaganda. It seems to be a deliberate industry wide effort to conceal the truth and to misinform the readers.
I know less about other topics but I'm pretty well informed and I see the same type of misinformation and patterns of deception practiced across the board.
I have very low respect for the profession of journalism and the so-called trained professionals who practice it. I think Joe the unregistered plumber is at least as qualified as most of the propaganda hacks who pretend to be journalists.
A lot of the best news sites these days are blogs written by amateurs. These folks tend to be far more interesting and have a lot more insight then the professionals. And many of them are at least honest about when they are reporting fact and when they are reporting opinion.
"A lot of the best news sites these days are blogs written by amateurs. These folks tend to be far more interesting and have a lot more insight then the professionals."
Although today the whole intent of journalism seems to be finding ways of making a story interesting, I don't see how an amateur blogger with an interesting story qualifies as a journalist. Frankly, the sources they use are the original news sources generally, so it is third hand information by that point, not to say I am not doing the same thing.
Ross Kressel
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/rosskressel
It was amateur bloggers that uncovered the forged documents in the Dan Rather story about George Bush's National Guard Service Record. That was pretty powerful stuff that ended several careers. And basically corrected the very distorted facts that were being spoon fed to the American people by the "professionals".
But generally you are correct. What bloggers do is mainly to disseminate stories that the National Medica (intentionally?) ignores. A lot of important stuff happens locally and gets reported locally but never makes it to the national media. Bloggers are good at assembling lots of these small stories, noting that when they are taken to gether they make a pattern which reveals a bigger and more important story and disseminating that out nationally to their audience.
For example I am very interested in illegal immigration. If one looks at the national news one will almost never see a story about an illegal immigrant raping a child. But if you dig into local papers, buried in the back pages you can often find several of these stories per week spread around the country. Bloggers identify these individual stories as a pattern and tell a very interesting and important story that for some reason (because they have a liberal agenda?) that the national media won't touch.
Some bloggers have become extremely powerful. The best example is Matt Drudge. He now all but controls the National News Agenda even though he and his organization do very little original reporting. I check his page daily and it often is filled with very obscure and kind of random stories from very obscure sources. But that night or maybe the next night, low and behold, these obscure stories are suddenly being covered by CNN and FOX. You can almost count on it. If you are a journalism student, it would make an interesting research paper to track the correlation.
While most bloggers are not as powerful as Drudge, if one follows several of the influential blogs it is amazing how often they are out in front and shaping the news cycle. It does not happen everyday but pretty often their insightful analysis gets reported by the "professional" journalists almost verbatim because they are smarter and better informed then the journalists and the journalists are lazy as hell.