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Matt Taibbi on Deluded Tea Partiers, Ayn Rand and How the U.S. Is Like the Soviet Union | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet

Matt Taibbi on Deluded Tea Partiers, Ayn Rand and How the U.S. Is Like the Soviet Union | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet: "Matt Taibbi: Sure and I was part of that. The campaign press are trained to cover politics like a sports story because it’s a successful way to bring eyeballs to television. You present it as an ongoing conflict between these two great parties, red and blue, conservative and liberal, and the rhetoric is more and more heated with each successive electoral cycle. And we present it like a World Wrestling Entertainment smack-down showdown. Even if you watch the actual political shows, they’re even structured exactly like ESPN’s football analysis programs, where you have the anchor guy on one side and there are four commentators, two from each team. That’s the way we do the news; that’s the way we do politics, and we’re not really trained to look at a deeper, more nuanced story. That’s the reason we missed this finance thing because it doesn’t fit into that formula at all. It’s very complicated. It’s also not partisan. It’s not the fault of one side or the other. But it makes it hard for us to digest.

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