Hubby and I had an argument the other evening about the mainstream press.  I love the man, but he thinks watching a few ten-second sound bites hand-fed to him on the evening national news is enough to educate him.  He's relying solely on this tightly parsed crap to inform the biggest decisions of his life, yet he'd spend more time investigating product performance and customer feedback over the internet before making a major purchase. 

Truly scary, to think that at least half of America is like him in this sense.

This kind of article makes me extremely skeptical about the quality of anything they report (particularly about presidential candidates).  The talking heads get something irrelevant stuck in their craw just so and they work on it to death.  (Tim Russert has joined the list of talking heads who worry a meaningless, trivial topic to the nub.  I don't like to promote his work, but just watch him pick up on trite garbage instead of the really big issues.  What a waste of time!  What an insult to the public!) 

In the mean time, the talking heads with the ten-second sound bites ignore the hurricane bearing down on them, ignore the reporting that every American should be getting instead of overripe pablum.  Why aren't the everyday Americans hearing more about the infiltration of Democrats' computer documents by the Republicans, that the FBI confiscated Senator Bill Frist's computer this week as part of the subsequent investigation?  Why aren't the people hearing more about the Plame Affair?  Why are we hearing only David Kay's defensive positioning on the WMD rather than hearing from CIA members and veterans about the stovepiping of intelligence?  Ask the average person on the street -- even elected officials in your local government! -- and they don't know about these scandals, or they've only heard meager snippets related to the WMD issue alone.

Unfortunately, we have no one to blame but ourselves.  We get the press we pay for.  I think it's time to cut them off and start paying for it directly.  Find journalists who are willing to take micropayments (in quantity) over the internet and let them chase the story.  By-pass all these corporate talking heads and get the stuff straight from the field, as it happens, unfiltered, uncut by corporate policies.

Make the press as a stand-alone entity either work for the money or make like a dinosaur.

[/rant]

2:02:23 PM    comment []