Reaction is coming in following Barack Obama's 30-minute infomerical that aired Wednesday night in prime time on three networks and one cable news channel.
Now that I think of it, should a news channel show a 30-minute candidate message? Well, that's a blog for another day.
Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales's review was called ObamaVision: An Appeal to the Masses. Shales writes the ad was "a half-hour, multimillion-dollar television infomercial that could be considered not the "feel-good" but rather the "feel-better" movie of the year."
Robert Bianco from USA Today wrote that Obama uses his TV time well in an article that starts by saying "It pays to buy airtime only if you know what to do with it - and Barack Obama clearly does."
Bianco also dismisses complaints that Obama went overboard with the massive time buy as he writes "in the old three-network universe, it might have. But we live in a multimedia world where anyone who lost interest had hundreds of other available choices."
But the substance of what Obama said during the infomercial got a serious rebuke from CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews. He writes in Reality Check: The Cost Of Obama's Pledges, that "the very bigness of his ideas is the problem: he seems blind to the concept his numbers don't add up."
Andrews concludes by writing "If he closes every loophole as promised, saves every dime from Iraq, raises taxes on the rich and trims the federal budget as he's promised to do "line by line," he still doesn't pay for his list."
CNN media critic Howard Kurtz tells Harry Smith on The CBS Early Show that the Barack Obama TV spot was well produced, but perhaps over produced in some ways:
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