In which I try to talk sense to bigfoot reporters:
And get nowhere.
Like, totally nowhere.
So, you know, it’s totally not the job of news organizations to look at polling of public opinion and identify areas where the public is badly misinformed as ripe areas for accurate corrective reporting.
It’s truthiness. It used to be that stories routinely carried a background piece of information. Today, I see that less. And the notion that, if someone says it, that legitimizes it, is corrosive and highly dangerous. As truth becomes opinion, no one is right, no one is wrong, and every discussion becomes a matter of opinion not a matter of fact. Highly dangerous.
when your prime directive is ratings/profits, then of course it seems mystifying that people might hold you to the standard of an actual news organization with an interest in creating an informed public.
You could really stop there – it’s about what brings the most marketable eyeballs and keeps them coming back. VH1 gets much better ratings than PBS…
That’s because PBS sucks too. Old lefties blathering. Nothing else, really.
AG
Plenty of old conservatives over there, too. More every month, it seems.
Oh.
I guess I can’t really tell the difference anymore.
Centrist conservatives vs. liberal conservatives?
Liberal conservatives vs. centrist liberals?
McDonald’s eaters vs. Burger King eaters?
PermaGov pundits vs. other PermaGov pundits?
Is it all one big PermaCon???
The ConMaGov???
“Tastes great!!!” vs. “Less filling???”
Oh.
I am so mixed up now!!!
Nevermind.
Yore freind…
Emily Litella
If you “can’t really tell the difference anymore” between today’s liberal and conservative leaders, Republican and Democratic Parties and their supporters, you’re proclaiming yourself unwilling to engage in a rational discussion.
Feel free to continue listing the ways that you view the leaders of the parties are exactly the same; you’ll hit upon many of my displeasures with both parties. In continuing on your path, you’ll fail yourself and your credibility by being so conspicuous in your unwillingness to concede that there are important issues where the R’s and D’s differ radically.
“… there are important issues where the R’s and D’s differ radically!!!???”
Riiiiiight…
Or is it:
Sorry, centerfielddj. Homey don’t play that game no more.
Whaddayou talkin’ about? Obamacare? Obamacare is going to turn out to be just another gigantic federal ratfuck like the IRS and TSA.
Do you really want to improve American healthcare? Take down the truly criminal conspiracy being operated between and among Big Pharma, Big Med and Big Insurance.
Do you really want to improve the American financial system? Take down the guilty parties like Jamie Dimon and related corporations.
Do you really want to improve America’s standing in terms of foreign relations? Take down the corporate-owned-and-operated military/intelligence/industrial complex and thus end U.S. dependence on militarily-enforced economic imperialism.
Do you really want to end the dominance of the Permanent Government over all forms of public discussion? Take the legs out from underneath the corporate-owned mass media.
Other than that?
Hunker down and wait it out. With your ass in the air.
Ain’t no other choices.
Bet on it.
AG
So:
Nothing about Labor and the rights of workers to have better compensation and working conditions. Obama has staffed his Labor Department and NLRB with people who actually defend working people as best as they are allowed within Labor laws and Judicial decisions which, on balance, have remained hostile to Unions and workers.
Nothing about a woman’s right to have agency over her own body, and reasonable access to health care and contraception. Need I document the hundreds of pieces of GOP legislation intended to return women to the 19th century?
Nothing about the Supreme and Circuit Courts, and Obama’s refusal to nominate judges with Scalia/Aleto philosophies.
Nothing about the regulations placed on insurance companies in the ACA. Nothing about the strong regulations that are being placed on banks, payday lenders and investment firms by the CFPB and other agencies which are beginning to reverse attacks on consumers by predatory financial institutions. Nothing about the aggressive ignorance of the GOP on climate and environmental issues. I could go on.
I suppose this isn’t surprising from you, given that Paul and Son and their supporters want to fully eliminate multiple government agencies and strip many others of their regulatory power. Not surprising from you, but disappointing.
You can write/cite all the laws that you want, but the corporate sector that owns this government has one and only one idea in mind regarding workers.
The bottom line.
If there is a better bottom line available to them…whether through the control of domestic labor by means such as bad education and forced debt or by exporting jobs to countries where workers earn substantially less while suffering under much worse working and living conditions…that’s what they will do. Ross Perot pinned the way the whole system was going to work way back in 1992:
Parity of wages w/all other countries, no matter how low those wages may be. That’s the idea, and that’s where we are headed. Is there a way around this? Yes. It’s called free trade, and may the best culture prosper. Downgrade the educational system to a point where almost everybody except the intended overseer class is misedumacated to the same degree…and bubba, that is exactly where we are headed now with the whole “No child left behind”/”Learn how to pass these multiple choice question tests” routine, bet on it…and the result is a population almost entirely ignorant of how things work, a population that can be led by the nose ring-holding media wherever the controllers want them to go.
“Oh, horrors!!!” you probably say. “He’s against the ‘No child left behind’ concept. He doesn’t believe that all people are created equal!!!”
No, I don’t. I think that some people are created smarter than others. This is not about any particular racial or sexual strengths or weaknesses; it is simply an across-the-board fact. “No child left behind” has a corollary…”No child pushed ahead.” Bet on that as well. The gradual elimination of a middle class in favor of a huge working class/consuming class/debtor class is the idea behind this current educational system. Sorry, but there it is.
Your “…reasonable access to health care” lick presupposes that the available health care itself is somehow “reasonable.” It is not. Truly reasonable health care would start with healthy food, but there is more short-term profit in the McDonalds Nation/GMO-ization of our overall food system than there is in actually educating people about how to eat healthily.
A “…woman’s right to have agency over her own body?” If it is in the profit interests of the controlling class for women to be workers rather than mothers then they will support contraception and abortion across the board. If they think that it would be better to create even more low-wage workers then the opposite will happen. Obama and the DemRats are also bottom line thinkers. Their disagreements with the RatPub factions are just a matter of tactics. The strategy remains the same. It’s just like foreign policy, centerfielddj. The Rats want war on the ground and the…currently…smarter Dems want mechanized/technologized/mediaized war. The economic imperialist principle remains the same.
The Supreme Court? Again…you have been propagandized into thinking that this whole “conservative vs. liberal” thing is a matter of morality. It’s not. It’s just a matter of tactics. It’s like the old Mad Magazine “Spy vs. Spy” comics.
They’re both corporate-owned societal bombers; they just disagree on weaponry.
You could go on?
Yes, I am sure that you could.
You could go on spewing the same liberal media-promoted bullshit.
You are disappointed in me? I am not disappointed in you. You are lockstepping right on into a late-blooming, media-enforced 1984. Your disappointment in me will be nothing compared to the disappointment that you will feel if you ever wake up and become able to differentiate the controllers’ deep and dark woods from the needs of individuals.
Step away from the mainstream media with your brains in the air.
You be bettah off in the long run.
Bet on it.
As will we all.
Later…
AG
P.S. Albert Einstein:
Me too. I’m with Al.
The above quote? That’s the current Dem way. Bet on it.
Wake the fuck up.
All you have to do is look at the sprawling…and still rapidly metastasizing…NSA/surveillance state cancer to see what is happening.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
Totally unresponsive to facts, you leave “the reality-based community” and reposition the FACTUAL differences between the Parties and the liberal and conservative movements to fit your own narrative.
The most disturbing aspect of your narrative is not what you are describing, but your utter disempowerment. In your world, all political leaders are the same and will remain the same, no matter what WE do. Of course, if we saw thing in the clear-eyed way YOU do and took…what action?…things would transform?
What’s your plan to change the things you care about? It doesn’t appear in your writings that I’ve read. Writing “WTFU” over and over again is not a plan.
I think that it will have to break, centerfielddj. I really do. No truly situation-changing politician is even given enough time by the media to try to make his or her case.
You write:
In the information world that is largely controlled by the Government Media Complex (Ron Paul’s term, and a damned good one) all political leaders are the same in terms of their core belief in American exceptionalism. No one else is allowed to be an active participant in the debates. Not really.
So it goes.
What am =I doing?
I am trying to open one mind at a time.
Open up or stay closed…your choice. If of course “choice” is quite the right word for a trance-driven media follower.
WTFU.
AG
Your frequent shout-outs to Ron and Rand Paul and their political movement are interesting, but given that you’re trying to open one mind at a time here at the progressive community at the Frog Pond, it would be worthwhile to have you answer to the many Paul policy
positions which are complete repudiations of progressive values.
You accidentally revealed one of those positions in your response to my discussion of Obama’s Labor Department and NLRB. You talked about free and fair trade, and not about Unions, labor law or workers’ rights at all. Trade is important, but so is labor law.
If you’re paying attention, you know the many other areas where the Pauls are in vicious opposition to the liberal/progressive movement. Let’s list just one more. You claim that women will have agency over their own lives and bodies if The Ruling Class decide it is in their business interests. It’s pretty appalling that you would whitewash the Pauls’ comprehensive opposition to a woman’s right to make family planning decisions and to have equal protection laws at the workplace.
You wouldn’t a reporter to give his opinion where Syria is, now would you?
In my opinion, Syria is on the northeastern border of Israel. But in somebody else’s opinion, it’s on the western border of Iraq. Who’s to say.NAother would insist it’s on the southern border of Turkey. Who’s to say?
And the Republicans say it directly borders both Egypt and Iran, and thus is a conduit for arms shipments from the ayatollahs to the Muslim Brotherhood. The White House disagrees, but nobody really knows who’s right.
This is pretty much the schematic of today’s corporate media system. There are no facts, beyond perhaps the location of a country on a map.
The job of the press in an inverted totalitarian state like ours is to help confuse the public so corporations and their owners and operators continue to have all the wealth and power.
Now, what the “reporter” said makes sense, no?
It’s that simple.
How much todd could a Chuck Todd chuck if a Chuck Todd could chuck todd?
That last one from Jake Tapper? That’s how he always operates.
In fairness, they are called JOURNALISTS and not THINKERS. They get the latter appellation after reading a few pages of The Federalist Papers and maybe a little Plato. Then they get a Ross Douthat/David Brooks sinecure for writing think pieces.
Give Tapper some time; that Plato can be some tough sledding.
Heh. They don’t see fit to do so for domestic issues. Expecting them to inform about things abroad is a bridge way too far.
So, nu? This somehow still surprises you? After how many years of being lied to by the media, Booman? How many? After the assassinations? After the whole Nixon boondoggle? After the lies about vote counts? After the…at the very least…coverup regarding the total ineptitude of the FBI, the State Department, the CIA and the military which culminated in 9/11? After the advertising money-driven lying about the efficacy of our totally rotted-out Big Pharma/Big Med/Big Insurance so-called “healthcare” system? After the horriffic lying about our financial system which preceded and followed the collapse of this economy? After the egregious lying of almost the entire media corps during the runup to the Iraq War? After the blind media eyes turned towards the encroaching surveillance state, blind eyes that were at least some degree forced open by Wikileaks, Anonymous, Manning, Assange, Snowden and the rest of the brave souls who put that information out there because the media had not done the job that it was (mythically) supposed to do?
And all you have is a little twitterish snark?
Get real.
Get mad, Booman!!!
Get mad.
You were mad enough when the Butch II administration was fucking up the country.
But now?
Jake fucking Tapper!!!???
Please.
How about Barack fucking Obama, fer chrissake!!!
How about Barack fucking Obama.
Please!!!
AG
I’m not surprised.
It’s just nice to see it put out there in stark terms for all to see.
Exactly. I like knowing whom to ignore. It saves me a lot of time.
That is, when a man’s big, fat, bloated paycheck, compensation all out of proportion to any conceivable public good he’s doing, when that paycheck depends on his not seeing or understanding a bone-simple concept, you can bet a dollar to a hole in a doughnut that he won’t understand it.
Tapper knows whence his fat bank account and nice life come, and it isn’t from any high-minded J-school ideals. Anymore, the popular media is just millionaires talking to millionaires about how tough things are for millionaires, and wouldn’t another tax cut be just the ticket to make everyone feel better?
Back during the Presidential election, I had a lot of intense discussions with a neighbor of mine. She is an ultra-conservative PhD, who actually read Atlas Shrugged cover to cover, and loved it. When she saw me outside working, she would often stop by and we would discuss current events, politics and political philosophy. Her arguments were often laced with things I knew came from Drudge, Fox News and other assorted right-wing information sources.
One day I finally told her, “Nancy, I think you’re getting your information from too much of an echo chamber. Your information is coming mainly from people who already agree with your point of view. You need to find a few other sources that challenge your argument to see how it holds up under factual scrutiny”.
She stepped back and looked at me incredulously, and said, “I get all different kinds of views, I don’t just watch Fox, I also occasionally watch CNN”
Yes, the same CNN that employs that juggernaut of investigative journalistic curiosity, Jake Tapper.
I think nothing more needs to be said….
Did she see your jaw drop?
I calmly told her, with a smile, that CNN was not exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. She is an older lady, so the sources she would most likely seek out would be mainstream types of news sources. I don’t think she would have been ready for the blogosphere. I encouraged her to watch Chris Hayes, as there was usually a pretty good give and take there. And conservative viewpoints were often part of the mix.
I don’t think there was much chance of penetrating her thought process, though. She told me, with a straight and serious face, that Obamacare had death panels. She told me how a lady she knew and trusted, and who was a nurse at one of our local hospitals, told here that they were already in place where she worked. All I could do was pat her on the arm, shake my head and tell her, “No Nancy, there are no death panels. I’m afraid you and your friend are severely misinformed.”
There are “death panels.” Insurance companies make those kinds of decisions – whose treatment for a terminal illness they’ll cover, and whose they won’t – all the time. Their bottom line is profitability, not the welfare of the patient.
Even if ACA “death panels” did exist, why people think that’d be any worse than what we already have utterly mystifies me.
Yes, a death panel decided my mother was too old and too far gone to be treated for her cancer. I don’t know if was Medicare or the hospital staff. They just said, “Leave. You are going to die in six months.” Interestingly, a co-worker is being aggressively treated with chemo and radiation for three cancer tumors in the throat and lung which his spread to the lymph nodes. He’s 54 and smokes like a chimney. But he’s 54 and male, not 82 and female.
It would have been kinder if a cheerful nurse had come into the room and said,”I’ve got some pain medicine for you, dearie.” and proceeded to inject a lethal dose of morphine. Much kinder than having to live with fear and despair for six months while a nursing home sucked all the money they could from Medicare while keeping her sedated just barely conscious.
After reading what you wrote about your mom, I am experiencing two competing emotions – overwhelming sadness and rage. I am so sorry. It’s just so wrong.
Last week I sat in the emergency room from 8pm to 8am with a friend whose sister appeared to be experiencing a psychotic break while recovering from a recent surgery. (The sister is bi-polar with some other mental illness issues and she is on Medicaid, and it appears that none of the hospitals want to “get stuck with her”.)
I spent 12 hours watching the medical systems in our town play hot potato with a living breathing human being who was stuck in a nightmare. And it’s still happening now, over a week later.
It’s one thing to know this kind of thing goes on, but it’s a real eye opener when you see it actually happening to another human being. The most constructive thing I can come up with at this point is “what the fuck is wrong with us?” Our society has seriously lost its way.
That makes me angry. 82 is NOT OLD. Currently have a 93 year old MIL under hospice care who’s basically pretty healthy physically, but developed dementia over the last 3 years and then quit eating. She started back eating,after the AL required us to provide round the clock sitters (she’s paying) but the hospice folk keep trying to get her on morphine. Her frailty makes her an absolute zombie with just the smallest does of that and her son/my husband put a stop to it after the first dose. She actually still connects with the world around her and will out with sentences and still feeds herself.
I was my Mom’s primary care giver until her death 2 years ago. She had severe dementia and was in a nursing home for almost 6 years. The nursing home doctor really cared about the residents, but visits with outside doctors over the years brought home to me how our medical profession/society sometimes write off older folk as not being worth the effort. These are human beings and deserve better. All lives have value and worth. If we are lucky, we will all be in the same place some day sooner or later.
I think that according to the canons of present-day journamalism, if a reporter were actually to identify areas where the public is misinformed, that would be cosnidered his personal opinion. Somebody else would say, no, the public is perfectly fine with that degree of misinformation or lack of information.
Then, too, some members of the public find, or might find, that newspapers are giving them too much information, more than they want.
So you just have to let the public decide for themselves what they are misinformed about — and whether they want to be any better informed about it. And then if they do, the invisible hand of the marketplace comes into play, and media consumers will prefer outlets that inform them better, thus putting newspapers out of business.
Of course, reporters must be doing a fine job, because that is just not happening. Oh … wait a minute.
What Jake Tapper said is that Jake Tapper is too important to lower himself to do that sort of duty — or to be held accountable by someone not subject to the journalist shield law. Not that the shield law affects this exchange with Tapper except in letting him know that, according to it he, unlike you, is a real journalist.
Did you expect anything more?
Congrats, BooMan. Nothing reveals character like that exchange. The blogs have not used the phrase “lazy journalists” for years for no reason.
I don’t know how to characterize today’s “news” system. Is it a debate without judges? A football game without refs? A very high-tech pool of stenographers typing everything vomited out by their bosses?
The stenographer image isn’t right, because I see too much journalistic willingness to parrot the “conservative” talking point verbatim, while challenging the Dem talking point (to the extent one is ever presented, ala the Sunday Morning Male Repub Panels).
That all these corporate media stars have adopted the same “it’s not my job to inform” pose, it seems clear that this is the prescribed answer from the Big Bosses and is thus a clear “editorial” decision. I guess truth is to come out and be recognized in the absence of neutral judges/moderators, who at best rule on style points, without ever challenging anyone’s evidence. In that sense I guess we live in a news world which resembles high school debates.
So for the system to work we have to rely on our fellow citizens to make the good faith effort to “inform” themselves, in the face of single view networks like Fox, and increasing presentations of single views and “interviews” by journalists who don’t think it’s their job to determine truth or reality. With a mix of about 90% opinion programming to 10% “fact” programming. Thus political opinion is now what is mostly meant by “news”.
One quaint First Amendment theory is that the “marketplace of ideas” will result in the “truth” being discovered, so no statements need be restricted, included intentional lies and falsehoods and slanders. The free-for-all is itself the vehicle of discovering truth. To the extent that this model ever had any force, it’s a rotting corpse now thanks to the editorial policy Chuck’s and Jake’s bosses have decreed. The marketplace of ideas functions about as well as the rest of our rigged “free market” charades. Failing economy, failing democracy.
There is one point of truth to this. The journalistic view is to report the two sides. This means that it is up to the two sides to support their position, and attack the other.
Now, let’s look at Obamacare. It was passed. Immediately, the Repukeliscum attacked. The democrats, being morons and fools in many cases or credulous chumps like Obama, waited for the media to correct the lies. The media has not done that for 20 years.
WHY DIDN’T THE DEMOCRATS COME TO THE DEFENSE OF THEIR OWN PROGRAM FOR 2 YEARS WHILE THE REPUKES SAVAGED IT?
Your question is covered above. Obama, Congressional Democrats and many spokesmen have defended their own program for many years by making factual statements and reasonable representations. The Republicans have attacked the program by telling multiple lies in almost every paragraph.
This puts the Democrat and other supporters of the ACA in a difficult circumstance. Since the host or reporter isn’t interested or knowledgeable enough to call out misstatements, it’s left to the Dem. They could choose to try to rebut each and every lie, but that’s not possible given the time constraints, and they’d be prevented from talking about their vision if they tried the rebut route.
It’s yet another way Republicans are taking advantage of the conventions of political institutions.
Actually, the White House has tried to “message” and to correct the record on the ACA. A lot. Til they’re blue in the face. Know how people like Jake Tapper report it?
“The White House said X. The Republicans said Y. In other news…”
Obama (or any President) is not God. He (or, hopefully soon, she) cannot simply wave a wand and implant ideas into the brains of hundreds of millions of people. For the most part s/he has to rely on media to convey the message. Tapper knows this perfectly well. That exchange is simply how he rationalizes away his disinterest in the “journalist” part of his job, and his excessive interest in the “Georgetown cocktail circuit” part of it.
Re messaging on the ACA, our side needs to copycat the right’successful messaging from the opposite side and we need a lot more than just Bill Clinton out there ringing the bell for the good that Obamacare has done and will do.
Corporate “news” channels are merely part of the entertainment divisions that house them these days, as I am sure others have astutely observed. Informing the public takes a back seat to keeping their respective audiences sufficiently sedated. Tapper is a joke, but then again, I could say that about most “news” anchors and commentators – they are after all essentially interchangeable.