Category: Media

If anyone needed more evidence that Missouri no longer is a bellwether state, the aftermath of Congressman Todd Akin’s Aug. 19 remarks about “legitimate rape” and female bodies’ defenses against impregnation should end the discussion. Even when the media frenzy about his comments peaked a few days later, an Aug. 22 Rasmussen poll indicated 38 percent still supported his U.S. Senate candidacy.

Just before Oprah Winfrey made the move to cable television from her popular national commercial broadcast syndication program in May 2011, she aired a show titled “American Heroes: The Freedom Riders Unite 50 Years Later.” That program revisited events depicted in an award-winning PBS documentary “Freedom Riders.” Guests were introduced as “heroes” but could have been termed “survivors” of that bloody era, when many Civil Rights activists were assaulted and some murdered.

Romney’s binder “blunder” in Tuesday’s second U.S. presidential debate is memorable. Then there was his Libya “lie” that was immediately corrected by both Barack Obama and CNN moderator Candy Crowley. But while both incidents have received press coverage and airtime, what some in the media also have noted in the days following the Hofstra University debate has been the former Massachusetts governor’s bullying tendencies. “Romney Gives New Meaning to Bully Pulpit” and “Mitt the Naïve Bully” are two such articles.

The most appropriate aphorism for the 2012 general election may be, “Never has so much money and effort been spent on so few people with such uncertain effect.” This brief summary of the fall campaign results from the confluence of two quite different electoral developments. The first is the recent – and growing – ideological and partisan polarization of the American electorate. The second is the vast and growing amounts of money being poured into the effort to elect the next president of the United States. The result is an enormous amount of money being spent by both parties – and all the outside groups supporting them – to convince a relative handful of undecided voters. By Election Day, both camps are projected to raise $1 billion.

Agriculture disparagement laws are laws enacted at the state level that allow producers of agriculture and aquaculture products to sue individuals and companies that purportedly make statements about the product that directly result in a loss of profit for the producer. The purpose of these laws is to provide economic stability for state economies that primarily are dependent on agriculture production and distribution. (Editor’s note: This is the final part of a four-part series on the defamation lawsuit filed by Beef Products Inc. against ABC News.)