Category Archives: Media Watch

Breaking News Or Broken News?

I was sitting at lunch the other day when I noticed the feed from a cable news network; flashing on the screen was the now ubiquitous “Breaking News”. That the story which filled the screen was hours old seemed of little importance…the network had nothing new to report anyway. And which cable news feed isn’t an important fact, as all news (and all sports as well) have adopted the same template for filling 24 hours of programming. That moment of typically lazy corporate reporting was emblematic of the dire threat facing our democracy. Rather than using the time available to explore a broad range of issues in depth, these 24 hour networks focus instead on going shallow on a narrow range of issues.

I believe this is a case where less is most assuredly not more.

But the outlets where Americans get their information are governed by the same rules of perverse incentive as all other aspects of our economy. And in the 21st Century, every information entity outside of PBS and NPR are owned and operated by for-profit corporations. Now I am a capitalist, and I embrace and endorse the need for corporate structures in our economy. But we the people must begin to understand and accept the true challenges faced by the convergence of democracy and capitalism.

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Honor Among Rapists

We have entered a strange period in America, a time when most of us have begun to equate political leaning with ethical and moral belief systems. We seem to believe we can judge the goodness of heart, soundness of intent, and purity of will in another by simply viewing their voting pattern. And far, far too often, we are ready to excuse ethical lapses and moral turpitude when they are committed by those with whom we identify.

The issue of sexual assault in the military is the current best bad example, with people who ought to know better tripping over themselves trying to find justification and political leverage. Make no mistake, sexual assault in the military is a problem; females in the service are more likely (in some classes, as much as four times more likely) to be the victim of an assault than females outside of the military. And that really ought to be the sum of the problem; honor and discipline being paramount virtues of the military, there should never be an excuse or rationalization for the problem.

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Call Of Duty

I was thinking about my annual Memorial Day post, reading Facebook memes and historical pieces on the origin of the holiday, when I ran across an advertisement. The video game, Call of Duty, was reminding fans and potential fans of its existence. A so-called first-person shooter, Call of Duty is challenging, engrossing, and fun. It also features the type of realism that pleases the cynics and worries society. Or should worry society, at any rate.

It only requires a brief period of listening to the comments of players engaged in virtual combat to understand the depth of hostility and hatred that the game seems to capture and focus. From the mouths of babes and adults alike come an endless stream of death threats and a stunning variety of racial abuse. The line between fun and violence glorification has clearly been breached for many in games like these, and many critics have questioned what harm first-person shooters can do to society. I have questioned it myself, as one who has played (and enjoyed) the franchise, and as one who has fired (and enjoyed firing) an assault rifle.

But I don’t believe the game is the cause, and I don’t believe that random interpersonal violence is the dangerous effect.

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Monsoon

Sarah Palin noted when criticizing President Obama that “it doesn’t rain but it pours.”

Indeed.

It has been 40 years since a president was pushed out of office for (among other things) ordering a break-in at the offices of political opponents (he got out of trouble by quitting.) It has been some 30 years since a president escaped prosecution for selling both anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles to the Islamist Iranian government and using the proceeds to finance a civil war in Nicaragua (he got out of trouble by saying he had no recollection). A decade and a half has passed since a president was impeached for lying about the willful abuse of a cigar in the Oval Office (he got out of trouble by asking for both sex and is to be defined.)

Just 10 years have passed since the last President, and his Administration, made the conscious choice to lie the American people into a war with Iraq. In contrast to the previous scoundrels, the last President’s actions only cost us $1 trillion and 4,000 of our best people…far less important, evidently, than a blow job in the White House. And far less important than the barrage of earth-shattering scandals plaguing our current scoundrel.

Oh the humanity!

A Marine holding an umbrella over the head of the President. That dozens of pictures and videos show dozens of servicemen holding umbrellas over the head of every president in recent memory apparently makes no difference. Of course, a female Marine holding the umbrella over the President’s head would have been within the code, but I can only imagine the hysteria that would cause. All would be well in the hills and dales of our peaceful countryside if only that dammed Obama would hold his own umbrella. Sure.

Heavens to Cheney, make it stop!

The former co-president recently said that the Benghazi raid was one of the worst things he can remember in his life. Having received no less than 7 deferments from military service in Viet Nam, it is easy to believe he holds no bad memories from then. But this is a guy who (along with Rumsfeld) helped sell Iran a nuclear reactor, and then watched the country taken by Khomeni…that had to be rough. He was a congressman when terrorists attacked a diplomatic compound in Lebanon  killing 241 Americans. This is a guy who personally supervised the first Gulf War…a lot of death and destruction in that deal. Finally, this is a guy who was the Vice President of the United States on a bright September day when the national security structure of our nation failed to keep us safe (to the tune of 3,000 dead and billions in damage.) One would assume that incident was traumatic. Oh yeah, and the ten (10) attacks on U.S. embassies or consulates that occurred when he was the Vice President of the United States; one might assume they were at least irritants to the man.

I almost forgot…Obama wasn’t the President during any of the above mentioned incidents.

But he was the President when the I.R.S. began targeting political organizations who oppose taxes, and who openly offer support to individuals in attempts to evade taxes, and who have applied for non-profit status to avoid paying taxes. I would call that an agency doing its job…but I guess profiling is only good when it is used on those “other people”.

And Sarah Palin says that it doesn’t rain, but it pours. And she says it as a part of more criticism of the President; the President that has persisted in doing his duty in the face of opposition so cynical and ridiculous that it looks like a Saturday Night Live skit come to life. Which is appropriate given Mrs. Palin’s own (ex) career. Lest we forget, the person that used the 2008 campaign as a machine for thrusting her family into celebrity, and several hundred thousand dollars of clothing into their wardrobe is a quitter.

When scandal threatened her administration, she took a flier. Sarah Palin clearly didn’t get the memo; sometimes the rain never stops, and sometimes the floods come. Real Americans wade through the detritus and start again; real Americans don’t like quitters. I suspect the Ex-Half-Term’s egg timer is about to ding.

 

The Rational Middle is listening…

 

A Daunting Challenge

The Rational Middle has, for some weeks now, been quite literally under water. (My basement had four feet of the stuff in it, and there I was with all of my swimsuits still in mothballs.) I have endeavored to write, but the task has been beyond my grasp…when faced with a mess of this size, where does one start? For the next few days, I will work through the following subjects that have attracted my attention, peaked my curiosity, or just ticked me off.

  1. Benghazi- Now and forever known as the “worst disaster” in Dick Cheney’s lifetime (his words), in any other time (or with a Republican in the White House) it would have been just a normal, if tragic, cost of doing business. The United States believes in an international presence, a presence that asks us to routinely deploy good people in dangerous places. Dozens (yes conservative friends, dozens) of diplomatic targets have been attacked by various forces regardless of the party affiliation of the White House during the last three decades. Many of these diplomatic targets were CIA fronts which demanded both secrecy and deniability. So where again is the scandal?
  2. IRSGate- When it is a person with an appearance that speaks to a Middle Eastern decent, and that person is hand-searched at the airport, it is useful and moral profiling. When it is the agency tasked with collecting all of the taxes which are legally and morally due, and they are targeting groups that openly state their intention to avoid said taxes, it is a massive scandal. (These “scandals” really are Republican’s following the Rambo Doctrine…fire enough bullets at a target and you will eventually find the mark…even with Hollywood bullets.) PS…President Obama’s statement condemning this action represents one of the great caves of all time, and a terrible tactical blunder.
  3. Corporate Welfare (NFL-style)- When lawmakers refused to vote on a tax which would have set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to renovate the Miami Dolphins’ (the private, for-profit Miami Dolphins) stadium, Commissioner Roger Goodell issued a back-handed threat; “We want the Dolphins to stay in Miami.” Why wouldn’t they? Better question; why don’t the various states pass laws in parallel banning the use of any public funding for private sports franchises?
  4. Jumping The Shark (NFL-style)- NFL.com has officially replaced all reporting with editorializing.
  5. Tebow- The story that won’t die, fueled by the single most ridiculous argument in the history of sports; that Tebow’s religion is a cause for teams to “blackball” him (as if most coaches on most teams don’t pray before games, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes isn’t the most ubiquitous player organization not called the NFLPA.)
  6. Falling deficits, job-challenged recoveries, and the nonsense of fiscal austerity- Six years after the economy started to unravel, the United States of America is more committed than ever to reaching the goal of returning our education and commercial infrastructure to Third World status. Apparently, the “job-creators” demand the freedoms that lucky entrepreneurs in business havens like Mexico and Somalia enjoy.

Tune in for these stories and more, coming soon to The Rational Middle.

 

 

 

An Inconvenient Meme

At some point in the last year I realized that age had caught up with me in the most superficially hurtful way; I left the key demographic. What I value, like, want, and need is no longer relevant to mass marketers. All of the music I like is relegated to classical and oldies stations. A solid majority of the people I interact with on a daily basis aren’t completely sure what I mean when I say “roll up the window.” A frighteningly large minority of the people I interact with believe that “dial up” is a charming relic of my (long ago) early years.

Worse, the knowledge deficit is bilateral. It wasn’t long ago (perhaps yesterday, or maybe last week) that I thought my father slow because he didn’t know what “bad” or “cool” meant. But it was only yesterday (perhaps a month ago, or maybe last year) that I learned what the term meme described. And now, firmly entrenched in the social networks as I am, the concept of meme is painfully unavoidable. A meme is a concept that goes viral, meaning that the number of people the concept is reaching is growing at an exponential rate (like an infectious virus). It is immediately evident that such growth is very good indeed if one (like a blogger) is trying to get their idea into the public consciousness.

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