The Laborious Nature of Reading "News"

Just a rant, no real point being made ....

One of my favorite undergrad classes was a Journalism class I took at UB.

I learned much of what I know about media, how it's run and most importantly, how to read the news. The last point is my topic of discussion. It's become a part-time job, reading the amounts you have to to try and get to the truth in news -- and even then you're not 100% sure what you've concluded is the truth.

Besides for the second half of "Special Report", you don't get a balanced perspective from Fox. They obviously and openly lean right.

Besides the Morning Joe round table, MSNBC, is basically Fox for the left.

As for the other alphabets, they're too worried about ratings and under reporting to make them credible, with the possible exception of ABC, who was not shy about any reporting the past few years.

And don't get me started on the ivory towers of academia. Honesty left the hall years ago. Instead, it's become a scene from the South Park episode where folks who were so impressed with one another they were admiring the smell of their own farts.

If you can come up with a new news model and get it started, you'd be a billionaire in no time.

Dude, I am so exhausted from sifting through the news for the past 6 -9 months I can barely find the energy to tell you how spot on this is and how much I agree.

While there is a large entertainment factor involved this is partly why I am a Rush listener. If I listen today and there is talk about X, he and his staff will go back find another story and kind of do the sifting for you. My only problem, is you have to sift through the bias Rush has, which for me is not tough.

For someone who wants to draw their own conclusions it's ridiculous the lengths it takes to be able to do that. The largest problem here is the networks are only giving the majority what they want. People don't want to challenge themselves. They want their viewpoints to be confirmed by the more intelligent with a combination of entertainment (sensationalism). Skepticism is the only way to turn belief into knowledge, correcting erroneous or simply incorrect beliefs.

Richard Weaver nails it in "Ideas Have Consequences" :

"A century and a half of bourgeois ascendancy has produced a type of mind highly unreceptive to unsettling thoughts."

"If we attach more significance to feeling than to thinking, we shall soon, by a simple extension, attach more to wanting than deserving."


Academia = pretension masquerading + towing the party line of thought.

It was tough for me as an ambitious college student to realize the truth is not the goal, even at the level of education. Frankly true education isn't even the goal. Because of the utilitarian mindset of society college is more about vocationalism than it is about true knowledge.

Weaver nails it again IMO:


"The world of "modern" knowledge is like the universe of Eddington, expanding by diffusion until it approaches the point of nullity. What the defenders of present civilization usually mean when they say that modern man is better educated than his forebears is that he is literate in larger numbers. The literacy can be demonstrated; yet one may question whether there has ever been a more deceptive panacea, and we are compelled, after a hundred years of experience, to echo Nietzsche’s bitter observation: "Everyone being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking." It is not what people can read; it is what they do read, and what they can be made, by any imaginable means, to learn from what they read, that determine the issue of this noble experiment. We have given them a technique of acquisition; how much comfort can we take in the way they employ it? In a society where expression is free and popularity is rewarded they read mostly that which debauches them and they are continuously exposed to manipulation by controllers of the printing machines. It may be doubted whether one person in three draws what may be correctly termed knowledge from his freely chosen reading matter."

I remember that book from my undergrad days. I've added it to my Kindle list and will have to reintroduce myself to it.

Thanks Sir!

I find myself drifting towards Rush sometimes. And I've been mocked for watching Dr. Maddow on occasion.

But they are the same problem, just from differing sides, and what Sir is referring to by quoting Weaver.

We have become a society that values feelings over all. Even worse, we have become a society that wants those feelings reaffirmed above all else.

Keeping with the topic of the media, I used to religiously watch 20/20. They were the skeptics and they were not ashamed to go after either side or take on any topic. Stossel in particular was a pitbull. He still is in many ways.

But now investigative journalism is dead. Because the media has been effectively splintered, you cannot run a honest piece of investigative journalism outside of "Which Restaurant in your Town has Cockroaches" least you be labeled biased one way or another.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by HoustonRaven

I remember that book from my undergrad days. I've added it to my Kindle list and will have to reintroduce myself to it.

Thanks Sir!

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Glad to reintroduce. Short book that is well worth the read. It may have a few more quasi-theological implications than you'd like, but the points remain. What was most interesting to me is that his outline simply follows the logical progression of thought by showing the historical cause and subsequent effect.

Quote:

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We have become a society that values feelings over all. Even worse, we have become a society that wants those feelings reaffirmed above all else.

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Bingo. The result?

The medias job becomes:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_b8cVMt5KsB...ed-piper-3.jpg

Either you have a piper that leads you left or one that leads right.