If Our Present Media Had Covered the 1860 Election!
Watching our broken media cover the election and reduce every single issue to the most trivial nonsense, I began to wonder: "what would have happened if we had our present media covering historic elections of the past?" Would we even have elected men like Abraham Lincoln? Or would they have made the election all about his beard?
Thus, this short diary imagining what would have happened if they had covered the 1860 election just like they do today. Enjoy:
Bob-Blowhard, reporter: "Abraham Lincoln gave a speech today calling for national unity to ‘solve our nation’s problems’ before a wildly cheering crowd of 50,000 in his home state of Illinois. Let’s listen to a brief portion.
There's More!
[cut to Lincoln at the podium]"We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell to the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Debra-Ditz, reporter/model: "I don’t know Bob. Lincoln gives a very pretty speech there, but I don’t know that this helps him rebut the charge by the Stephen Douglas camp that he’s ‘too elitist and out of touch with American voters.’ Doesn’t he seem a bit condescending and elitist to you, using all those big words? It’s kind of like he’s talking down to voters a bit. I don’t know how well this speech is going to go over with the average swing-voter in Ohio or Michigan. Would you really rather sit down and have a beer with this guy than Steven Douglas after hearing this speech? Maybe not.
Bob-Blowhard: Well Debra, we here at Faux News commissioned a poll to address that very question. We asked our viewers ‘Is Lincoln too inexperienced and elitist to be President?’ 43% of voters said yes. 39% said no, and the rest were undecided. Clearly Lincoln has some work cut out for him if he’s going to convince the average swing voter he’s not too elitist. The Douglas campaign has been scoring big points recently with that line of attack.
Debra Ditz: Meanwhile the Stephen Douglas campaign released another ad today, blasting Lincoln for being overconfident about his chances in the election. But this one has a twist. It subtly suggests, without coming right out and stating it, that maybe Lincoln has some Negro blood in him and that’s why he’s really so opposed to slavery! Is this new ad going over the line? Let’s play the ad over and over again, so that everybody is sure to see it or read about our obsessive coverage of it, discuss it for hours with representatives for both candidates, and then let you the viewer decide!"
Bob-Blowhard: But before we go to the ad Debra, lets bring in a couple of our usual panelists to briefly discuss the issue of whether Lincoln’s alleged ‘flip-flop’ in recent comments on the issue of slavery is responsible for the surge in Douglas’polling numbers in the mid-west. Douglas has been on the attack all week with the argument that, whatever voters may have thought of the original decision to enslave Africans and bring them to this continent, a decision which he supported along with President Buchanon, "the recent downturn in slavery-related fatalities proves that it can no longer be denied -- slavery worked! Lincoln was flat wrong to question whether we could get slavery to work!" Let’s go to our panelists!