As Americans commemorate this President’s Day 2008, we begin by revisiting excerpts from last year’s Issue Of The Week on this day: “As Americans commemorate this President’s Day 2007, the 2008 campaign for the next President of the United States is already in full swing . . . The free media, the press, has increasingly been seen by commentators and academics as pandering to the entertainment side of politics, image over substance, which increasingly favors the candidate who best comes across in the media . . . The late Elliott Roosevelt, who accompanied his father, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to historic meetings with Churchill and Stalin, wrote the forward to the book ‘The Presidential Election Show’, authored by Keith Blume, the founder of the organization (Planet Earth Foundation) which created World Campaign. Mr. Roosevelt wrote, ‘The only conclusion one can reach at the end of this book is that, thanks to the network nightly news programs, issues mean virtually nothing and personality projection means everything in presidential politics.’” The large majority of voters agreed last year that the media was focusing less on journalism and more on personalities, polls and images, decreasing the focus on thorough examination of issues and increasing the focus on personality projection. There appears to be wide consensus as the campaign has gone forward that not only has there been more emphasis than ever by the media in general on horserace, polls, personality projection and image over issues, but that there has been media bias in favor of or against specific candidates to a degree perhaps unparalleled in modern political history. Do you agree that in the 2008 Presidential campaign to date, the media has demonstrated decreased coverage of policy issues and increased sports-like coverage of horserace, polls, personality projection, image, and bias for or against candidates, resulting in endangering democracy as described by Elliot Roosevelt years ago, because a lack of responsible journalism “does not allow the voters a chance to really understand what each candidate is offering”?