It's not news. They call it news, but it is not news. It has not been "News" for a very long time.
I remember what News was. It was delivered by a serious journalist, with credentials, a resume of journalism, and an ability to seek out, investigate, and report the findings to the public. They were called "Reporters" at first. Later, they were called "Anchors". (The art of Fact Checking began to slip away as Reporters morphed into "News Readers" and Anchors into "Hosts"... like game shows.)
They did not render extreme points of view on a topic, subject or story. They did not seek out 'opinions', they hunted down facts like cats at a gopher hole, not afraid to wait, dig, gather and bring us the result. Getting it right was more important than getting it first.
They are all gone now. Not one network has any remnant of what News was. They still call it News. They still deliver it as if it is relevant, but it is not even informative. It is Fact Free, junk sourced, spliced together in a shallow grave of ethical standards, and it stinks.
But we keep tuning in. We keep thinking that we are watching, listening to "The News", delivered mostly by models who read scripted 'chatterful' blurbs, skimming only the surface of anything relevant, not wasting time on "in-depth", ignoring logical follow-up. The research in some cases, is nil. It is a circus of fabrications, strung together, regurgitated, and then presented as "the Issue" or "The Controversy".
To give this Fact Free fluff and stuff the air of importance, every show seems to cater to the WWE formula of absurdity to 'rivet' attention on the junk food being stuffed down our gullets. They impanel 'discussion groups', throw out statements that are premised on absurdities or outright falsehoods, and intercept any civility or decency with rudeness, greater falsehoods and encourage both sides to dig in on the most extreme angles. Directors shouting in their earpieces to "Raise it up a notch!" "Don't let him get away with that!"
The audience becomes witness to one car wreck after another, with nothing being resolved or discussed. We are left with the bad taste of being tricked, yet again, into watching a death match between extremes.
At the end of the show, we decide who "won" based on sound bytes, not on substance. We realize that we are ever more divided because, instead of coming to a reasoned conclusion on matters that affect us all, we have had inflicted on us, greater insult to our intelligence, our opinions, our sense of civility. They even ask us to "vote". Even those choices are extreme. But it gives some viewers a false sense of having a say in what is being said. Insanity in a mirror maze of illogical dialogue.
Worse, this media garbage goes out to the world. Other nations watch our behaviors, marvel at our ignorance, are stunned at how badly we treat one another. And we wonder why our allies have second thoughts about supporting us on issues and in events that are critical to our survival, progress or standing in the world?
We present ourselves as raving lunatics, or as people who take sport in taking one another down, with no consideration for what is true and what is just outright lies. Our sense of 'balance' has been skewed to only accept extreme opposites rather than factually reasoned studies, investigations, discourse. Middle ground is the abandoned territory, forgotten by Pilgrims who became distracted by the circus.
Meanwhile, we as a nation remain uninformed, or at best misinformed.
We as a nation cannot see ourselves resolving issues. We can't even envision speaking to one another to save our country. Shouting has become the weapon to silence those who would point out a better path. What treasures await for us to find them in the common ground of our best interests?
We look to media "News" to give us information, but they give us garbage. We give them our viewership and their masters rake in advertising dollars. It's not about us, it's not about Truth, it's not about Facts. It's about ratings.
As long as they get the ratings, as long as we keep showing up, tuning in, expecting it will be more substantial this time, as long as we keep turning on the TV, nothing will change.
CNN bills itself as News. They even have a handful of quality reporters. But they put their prime time programs into scripted rancor, divisive grudge matches and whipped with outright fictional statements, sourced through the most specious of outlets.
Lou Dobbs is gone. They allowed him an on air presence to spew his racist, fact-free "discussions" for too long. He signed off by ignoring his blatant abuse of the platform. He made it sound as if some great conspiracy was afoot to silence him as he toiled to bring us the most inflammatory of insanity, the Birther Conspiracy. He did his best to burn down the house that had kept him for too long. I suspect he took a dump in his dressing room, in case someone would miss his message of contempt.
He catered to and brought an audience to CNN that consisted of the most racist, least educated, most unstable viewers, who saw in him, a champion for their Trailer Trash mentality. CNN allowed this because it brought viewers, which increased their revenues.
They did not fire Lou Dobbs because they suddenly awakened to the fact that he was divisive, lying, fanning the flames of racism. They fired him because they fell to last place. People, in protest, or out of common sense, not only quit watching Dobbs' spot, they quit watching CNN -- period. It was a business decision, not a moral one.
Wolfe Blitzer has now taken over that vacated spot. His awkward attempts to keep stirring the insanity and the rancor and the prevent the discussions from becoming 'enlightening' or for either side to use quality researched facts to inform the public or defeat the extremist bullying, belies the true nature of what is, not just CNN, but all "News" programs these days: Circuses of the Absurd.
MSNBC and other networks employ the same tactics. They don't bill themselves as anything but commentary, but to keep with the extremist mentality, they put on blatant racists such as Pat Buchannan, just to make sure that the discourse doesn't stray too far from the fireworks that 'gets people's attention' and 'makes em mad' and of course, leaves us worse off, less informed, than before the panel discussion was inflicted on us.
An outraged viewership consumes more blindly, products sponsored. A thoughtful, contemplative audience is also less prone to impulse buying. Worse, they can, with awareness and facts, challenge many of the practices that make Corporate Sponsors, and Corporations that own media--- nervous. Ergo: outrage creates purchases; reasoned thinking creates potential opposition in the market place.
Both CNN and MSNBC throw us crumbs of quality. A show here or there, of merit and quality. They do that to tease us into knowing that they are capable of more and better, but that they won't give us more of the better.
If we want more, we have to wade and cut through swamps of scripted chatter, cage match panels of extremists pitted against one another based on the premises of questions or challenges based on the sleaziest fictional point/counterpoints. Come for the substance, leave because of the insanity. It's Lucy and the Football, over and over again.
It's not news anymore. It's "Opinion Wars".
We don't ever get to hear 'other educated points of view.' We have extremist propaganda hurled at us by those who don't care how much damage has been done to the facts, the psyche of the nation as a whole, or to our image to our own nation and other nations with whom we share this world. They care nothing for the damage done to the future, the children and grandchildren not yet born.
Gatekeepers
Being informed makes one more empowered and makes many, a force to be reckoned with. Being uninformed or misinformed creates a sense of fear, panic and an army of outraged willing to stampede in any direction pointed by incompetent regimes or administrations; unable to know both what is wrong nor how to fix it. It is the guarantee of Power used by every nation and by every Corporate Giant, to manipulate the population into a deeper and deeper enslavement.
It is to the benefit of oppressive governments and powerful corporations everywhere to combine their powers and essentially, be the Gatekeepers of information. Gatekeepers can block good, truthful, fact based information from getting out. Conversely, they can dispense erroneous data, manufacture and fabricate at will, to keep the population not only isolated from the rest of the world, but from listening to or trusting one another.
Communication is key to any organism functioning, thriving or withering and dying. By making people unable to communicate with one another, we effectively become disunited and less able to function cohesively in a time of crisis.
Weapon of Mass Distraction
Using only extreme points of view has only one purpose: Excitement. Like a dog fight. Nothing but blood in the ring at the end of the battle. We cheer for our dog to win. We forget that it's not supposed to be a dog fight. No one is supposed to "win". We are supposed to be informed. We are supposed to find common ground with one another and ways to overcome the damage inflicted on our nation over a generation of deregulation, melt down and allowing a Frat Boy mentality with a cowboy swagger, to steer us into needless wars.
We keep feeling that we are in this arena, and the beasts are released to savage our points of view, and we engage in battle mode and lose sight of the fact that we should not be trying to "win"--we should be, and we really need to be, as a nation, focused on how we can heal from the damages already inflicted.
Media should be an avenue by which we find our common ground, our healing. But it is not. It could be so much more, but it is not. Rather, for the sake of both ratings and keeping us disempowered, it is the greatest weapon in the Mass Distraction arsenal.
We, the greatest nation on earth, were stampeded by the most incompetent of administrations into being responsible for the slaughter innocents.
It has left us tangled in a destabilized region of the world, creating even more extremism, contemplating more soldiers in an endless war, or to withdraw and allow to happen, that which was set in motion when the war started, and then left to languish as more opportunities for destruction came into view. Do we embrace the inevitable? Or do we throw more blood and treasure into the hole of our creation?
Our extremist politicians failed to prevent us from being attacked. They use their bumbling in the Middle East, to scare us into fighting one another, in death matches of facts and fiction, hosted by media that scripts discussions to be either shouting matches between lunatics, or mindless chatter between airhead hosts.
We have become a Civil War mentality. Media is doing nothing to bring us to reason, nor to understanding or to coming together, and everything to divide us, for the sake of ratings.
People are less educated, and more misinformed in our nation than at any time in our history.
That leaves us vulnerable to exploitation on a level never before possible.
The media does not have our best interests at heart. I would dare say, they don't even have our best interests, as a nation, on their radar. Most are owned and controlled by corporations that frankly, make a whole lot more money if we don't wise up to what they are doing to make it worse.
Their greatest fear is that we, the greater thinking part of us, would come together and accomplish great things, and become a nation of free-thinking, tolerant people who do not judge or fear others based on skin color, religion, or choice of life partner. We would be unbreakable, unscareable, indivisible, if that were to happen. It would be harder to exploit us by group, ethnicity, economic strata. Government would work for US, and not for the corporate masters who demand we be enslaved, impoverished, ignorant and unhealthy.
Our Power
We need to remember that we have the power. Media may work to distract us, but it cannot work without us. Instead of being willing, helpless accomplices to our own detriment, we can demand from them, more and better. We can make it so that those who run the media, in order to survive as a corporate entity, can only do so if we are pleased with them adhering to a standard of civility, investigation, research, and quality of information.
They can work to earn us, or they can risk losing us.
Government will do what the people allow them to get away with; or they will do what the people deem is in our general best interests. They will be responsive to us if we stay informed and united.
Government and Corporations fear that we will become united. That would mean that our Tax dollars go to helping our people, not as payoffs to billionaires who belong to their clubs, and who made their fortunes by exploiting our resources and then polluting our air, putrefying our waters and poisoning our arable lands.
Corporations will have to behave in a responsible way. Welfare will be for citizens who need it, not for Corporations who give billion dollar bonuses to their executives. Money is a resource. We can become Gatekeepers of that resource if we become informed.
There is so much we can do if we become informed. To become informed, we are going to have to find a way to listen to one another. We can't do that if we engage our energies and our efforts to match the force of the willfully ignorant and those whose mission in this world is to keep us divided. We can step aside and let them fight the fog while we carry on, building and repairing.
They will destroy themselves if there is no common enemy for them to engage. They have already begun to cannibalize themselves as a natural part of their process. The more we engage them directly, the more we delay their inevitable demise as a force or even a movement.By engaging on the level where their ignorance is being revealed, without directly engaging them as that ignorance, they lose status in their peer group. In fact, the group is forced to countenance their ideas as making them vulnerable or subject to ridicule. They cannot martyr themselves, nor can they be Champions. They become part of the mass of wrong thinking and cannot earn our individual attention. They have to seek our our words to know how we responded. We no longer deliver to their door. They have to work for it. Drain their energy.
Since the greater the ignorance, (and their endeavor is solely aimed at elevating Ignorance and Fear) the more fragile the ego, Ego will attempt to gain status. If it cannot gain status by direct person-to-person engagement and remains secondary to "Ideas" or "Ideals" , it will seek standing amongst its peers. The peers are also Ego seeking, and they will then battle amongst themselves. Meanwhile, we have been hard at work, working towards what we know needs to be done in this Country, in order to heal, repair and rebuild. By the time the opposition runs out of steam and they will because they will have exhausted it fighting amongst themselves, we will be so far ahead of them, we won't even hear their whimpers. However, each time we elevate them to Person of Importance status by engaging them by name, rather than by flawed idealism and percussive jingoism, they become heroic or at least 'noticed' by their peers, even for that brief time.
Essentially, they seek us out to engage personally, not for sharing ideas, but rather, to be the name of the thorn in our side--big enough to bother us, disturb our calm and create a cage match, event to raise their profile among their peers. They need US to do that for them. We can choose to respond to the ideas, the words, without responding to the person directly, and without elevating that person, for that precious 15 min of fame.
If they want to engage, they will have to find a way to do it that is civil, respectful or they will find they are left out of the greater functioning system, and less able to have an effect/impact on how the future is shaped.
I'm on Twitter. @catawu . I find that I often fall into the sport of engaging in cage matches with extremists who troll social media for the sole purpose of creating a presence that bends the arc of information away from truth, away from progress, away from healing, towards fictional realms of fear and ignorance.
I do that because I am a scrappy person by nature. It's in my make up to be in-your-face against liars, racists and bullies. I get my buttons pushed because I allow my buttons to be pushed. I engage because I don't want to just leave that crap out there...
But I have been rethinking my approach lately. We have only so much energy and so much time. If I waste it in these worthless cage matches, or trying to inform and enlighten those whose intention is to create and support false doctrines, it leaves me with less energy and time to devote to real discussions with real people who are working to make it better. Fix and repair what is left of our nation. Pass Health Care so that I, my friends and millions I will never meet or know, will not be financially gutted before they die from lack of health care.
@Karoli had an excellent posting on her blog, Drums and Whistles, about disengaging from the bloodsport aspects of social media. http://www.drumsnwhistles.com/ "The Left Doth Protest Too Much" and it made real sense to me.
Another Tweeter, @cynthiaboaz has a more Ghandiesque approach to social media and engaging the attackers. She makes real sense in her approach.
I came to realize that we all have something really important to bring to the discussion. We all have different styles. We all have different ideas. What we have in common is a burning desire to overcome the tyranny of Corporate induced "Information Soup" that offers very little substance, consumes our attention, and detours us away from our common ground, and any attempt to reach it and help ourselves by helping one another.
We have different parts of the Big Picture. We all bring something. We have different styles and we can learn from one another.
Some of us will engage in cage matches, some of us will encourage boycotts of programs or hosts that are the most extreme, some of us will gently but firmly, mirror to the attacker, what they are doing.
What we need to do, each in our own way, is to support one another's efforts where we see the value, even if we are not using the same approach.
When we unite and stick together on the key points of issues that are important to us, corporations and our government, is forced to concede to us, that which is ours, has been ours all along: The Right to choose to not have inflicted upon us, propaganda, and manufactured divisiveness.
We can choose to not accept, either by ignorance or habit, that which they project into the media, to steer us into greater divisiveness. We can turn it off. We can turn off the "news" that is not news. We can turn off the impulse to engage when red meat is thrown into our territory. We can choose to ignore them completely. That will drain their strength, and they will turn in a direction where they think they can have an impact, or they will fade away.
We can offer them nothing. Not even our engaged opposition to their outrageous, inflammatory statements. We can spend that time and energy, working with those who are working to help us and to repair this nation.
I still have the urge to take a swing at them. It's in my make up. But I have been watching and learning from others, and you will find that I am disengaging from them more than I am engaging them. I will still pursue politicians and make them aware that I am aware. I might occasionally go after an asshat that has a public stream, where I can expose their lies and motives and hypocrisy.... but most of my time will be spent behind the scenes, working to support those who are doing the hard work, nose to the grindstone, and who could use a hand from time to time.
I will still enjoy my friends ravaging the ignorant inflammatory, with the ease and alacrity of swatting a fly. I will still support my friends whose steely courage in demanding answers, truth and responses, makes them superstars in my book.
I will do what I do best in the way that I do it better than most. I will be a helper, a supporter, and will add value where I have value to add. I will more actively seek out those who are doing the nuts and bolts constructive repairs and see where I can add to it and help out.
There will still be wars raging, attacks flying, and hysterical repertoire. I will still High Five my battle weary compatriots, and reach to uplift those who have been battered and bruised. There will still be anger, lies and stunning ignorance... but I will endeavor to ignore it and continue on with my work, knowing that my energies and time in this world are finite resources.
I think most of us like to go to the circus. It's entertaining. But few if any of us, really want to live there. We just need to wake up and realize that we can leave, anytime. And when the show is on rerun loops every 12 minutes, as many "News" networks are, we should just realize that it is not going to change, get any better, unless we leave and come back later--maybe. Maybe not come back at all.
*I mention CNN & MSNBC because they can do better. FOX has a stated goal of destroying our nation by destroying our President, by lying and grossly misrepresenting issues. Anyone that watches FOX is beyond my ability to reason or to understand.
