The day after Hillary led a celebration of the Democratic nominee and of her historic ceiling-cracking, there were cracks showing in the seams of CNN’s wall-to-crawl coverage of the convention.
With actual unity rearing its unglamorous head, CNN drummed up “body language expert” Dan Hill to analyze whether there could maybe, hopefully, be bitterness and deceit lurking beneath a rousingly positive speech and an uncharacteristically warm message toward Obama.
Of course!, Hill dutifully proclaims … “… the cheeks didn’t tend to lift very much, it was really almost what I would call a ‘crocodile smile.'”
Thank goodness. There’s still flame-fanning gold in them thar Hills. Reading this on CNN.com’s Politicker, I felt the usual anger at a pandering media and a down-bred audience rise up.
But then I checked out the reader comments below the entry and my faith in people, and in open comment threads, began to return. “wow….well, it’s unanamous…,” wrote Sean in ATL, “the media has become mind readers. …” While EJ said “Would you give me a break? I’m confident that no speech that Hillary could have given last night would’ve pleased the press; there’d be no story otherwise.”
Talk about keeping them honest.
I’ve certainly closed threads to comment in my day, but the capper was seeing that after only 52 minutes of an over-it audience holding its overblown media accountable, the poor moderators at CNN.com had had enough. They closed the thread down. Jeez. Talk about missing the story.
UPDATE: They reopened the thread about 15 minutes after they closed it. Then later they closed it again … which probably isn’t that unusual.
tags: #dnc08

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