Lucia

de Vernai

Read Lucia's bio and previous columns

January 14, 2009

Joe the Plumber: Idiocy in Media

As hard as America may try to forget its flash-in-the-pan celebrities, train wrecks are hard to ignore, regardless of whether they’re a presidential administration or some Joe Schmoe that happened to be in the right place at the right time. In the case of the latter, John McCain’s man of the moment – and awkward silence fill-in deluxe – Joe the Plumber is the unrelenting example.

Apparently the Obama victory – and the inevitable financial ruin it means for Americans – lead Joe to abandon plumbing and enter a much more financially stable profession – journalism. While he lacks Anderson Cooper’s penetrating glare and the power of enunciation, it’s not pretty boy antics that made him Joe the Plumber, War Correspondent.

Samuel J. Wurzelbacher has been hired by Pajamas Media to spend 10 days in Israel to let "average Joes tell their story." You wouldn’t know it, but the man has a pretty firm understanding of what needs to change with war reporting. First of all, to hell with bias. According to Wurzelbacher, unlike all those schmucks with experience, what he “can provide are actual real questions and get real answers.” Not sound bites, mind you, or manufactured answers, he emphasized, “and uh, not giving it any kind of slants."

He brought up a good point while talking to reporters about his assignment, stating that journalists shouldn’t even be allowed near war – blaming the daily reporting on decreasing morale. If he has his way, things would be like in the times of World War I or II because “now everyone's got an opinion and wants to downer and down soldiers. You know American soldiers or Israeli soldiers."

The American media has two systems for saying stupid things on TV: It’s either a goof by a reporter mispronouncing a name or getting too excited about his guest’s cleavage, or it’s scripted, runs on Comedy Central and picks up an Emmy every year. In both instances, the journalists know that they just said something ludicrous. This is not the case with Joe.

To be fair, the man has a clever strategy. He seemed to be destined for country music stardom or a book deal about the “one man that dared to stand up to the dark forces of higher taxation.”

Instead he has made his mark by harassing Israeli reporters. American image abroad is not going to get better as long as people like that represent us.

Whenever a big election in the U.S. takes place, a populist impulse arises to prove how lack of experience, education and a world view based on adages instead of facts makes one, not the other, more representative of America. All of it results in a Joe the Plumber.

The only people the average Joe represents is (at best) other average Joes – his experience is not mine, not the black urban family’s, not a Jew’s living in the Midwest, probably not yours. We promote diversity in schools, equality in the workplace. Idiocy in the media has no place in America, and no business representing it abroad.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.