GOP Turnoff Week

My own political version of TV Turnoff week begins tomorrow, the first day of the "Retropublican" party convention.

Despite the recent mea culpas from the New York Times and the Washington Post about their uncritical reporting both before and during the Iraq War, the mainstream media has tried to excuse themselves by saying that they have just don't have the influence and power either to educate Amercians as to the truth or lies of the Bush administration's politics and policies or to stop the administration from doing things like going to war against a country like Iraq, that neither had any connection to political Islam and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nor embodied a threat to America's national security.

I'm going to assume that the media are correct in their statements about their impotence. If they are indeed as impotent as they claim to be, then why should I bother reading, watching or listening to what they have to say about the GOP convention? So I'm going to enact my own mainstream media boycott this week.

As George W. Bush himself said during the October 17, 2000 presidential debate, "The best weapon is the off/on button."

I am about to either put a hold on or cancel my Boston Globe subscription completely. And I am not going to watch or read or listen to any other of the mainstream media this whole week. That means none of the network or major cable TV channels, no mainstream media websites, and no corporate radio.

I would have liked to have gotten on the ball and organized this into a full-fledged political movement (I imagined that someone like Howard Stern or at least the people at Air America Radio could have gotten behind this), but as it stands this is my own isolated piece of political action this week, and I encourage others to join me in "shunning" the mainstream media in whatever fashion they deem fit.