So, here it goes.
I have been following news events for some time and have experience in some of the areas being reported. For example, I did a lot of research and wrote reports, area studies and analyses for a specific area of the world. Much to my surprise, while these polemics didn't have a lot of circulation, they were somehow revived a few years back and things I was writing about over twenty years ago were suddenly deemed relevant.
Currently, news is hardly objective. I was watching a report by a journalist and the anchor stated that he wanted the journalists opinion on the events being reported. Now, the "opinion" of the journalist was in complete contradiction to the facts reported. In other words, while the journalist was supposed to be reporting events and, in fact, did a pretty good job with just the facts, what was really being sought was the journalist slant on the events. A slant from one person is no more valid than a slant from another regardless of job or position. Anyone can develop an opinion after researching facts. The opinion my be well supported by facts or repudiated by facts but it is still an opinion. I know how to analyze facts and derive positions based on those facts that allow operations moving forward. So as small as my audience might be, I am as capable of deriving trends from facts as the highest paid journalists.
Being able to simplify difficult and complex ideas happens to be one of my strong points. Sometimes that is missing from even such luminaries as major anchors and commentators. People build opinion based on a series of observed facts and these opinions are biased by belief. While we have become a two-party system, polarization of position is not necessarily the domain of one or the other party. So quick identifiers don't really help decipher what one is listening to on any main station. Commentators and journalists do not really want you informed. They want you persuaded. Bill Oreilly can hoot "fair and balanced" all he wants but in reality, his opinions are really left of center. This is curious because supposedly, liberals have tagged him as a conservative. But if one really evaluates his positions, he is more left than not. Why isn't someone pointing this out? If he is so popular, does that mean that most of America is left of center even though he and others constantly point out that America is really a conservative population? We now have Obama and as liberal an administration as I can remember. Most of the news and most opinion is actually supportive even though there is a supposed balance in news reporting. I have always wondered how Obama could have been elected if Americans are supposedly right of center for the most part.
But still, most of a newscast is opinion. An anchor will give a fact and they will bring in people to comment on the "fact" as if they are experts in the field. In fact, they are simply people with opinions. George Bernard Shaw wrote a fantastic play called "Don Juan in Hell." In the play, Don Juan plays a character searching for "truth." He has a really great line: "People mistake opinion for intelligence." The more I follow any news, this is what I come away with: Broadcasters act as if they are intelligent simply because they have opinions. They must think we are absolute idiots to take anything they say seriously.
As I said, I have been listening to or watching news for quite some time and wonder how some of the commentators can continue to hold court when 90% of what they say is biased or completely wrong. I found/find myself saying, "Who the hell would believe that." or "Doesn't that person have any historical perspective at all?" At any rate, I was arguing with the television so much that I finally decided to put my positions out for other people to read. Like everything in life, some agree and some disagree.
Some years back, I ran for a local political office. I had my eyes opened. It was astounding how the biggest liars got the most attention. And I mean liars. I made three promises: 1) I would always speak as factually as I could. 2) I wouldn't engage in negatives but instead focused on solutions. 3) I wouldn't accept any PAC money from any special interests. I laid my platform out and got involved in all the round table discussions where I learned a valuable lesson: Never, never, never answer a question you don't know by stating, "I don't really know but I will find out and get back to you." What I learned was that if asked a question I didn't know, divert the point of the question to something I want to talk about and ignore the original question or make the question of minimal importance.
Well, I see a lot of this when politicians are questioned. Some, like Barney Frank are masterful at not only diverting questions but on replying with such nonsense that he sounds profound. I, for one, am sick of this behavior. If I can even get one other person to start listening to everything politicians say with a huge amount of cynicism, I will have done some good. I don't expect or even want everyone who reads my missives to agree with me but I hope that they cause people to think.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story back in 1961 called "Harrison Bergeron." In it, society has become totalitarian and intelligence is handicapped so that everyone thinks on the same level. Harrison, a mysanthropic kind of character, finds a way to defeat the handicaps. He rebels and with a ballerina who he has also stripped of handicaps, dances on TV. His message is, "Turn off the message." In other words, dump the handicaps, turn of TV and start experiencing the world from a new perspective.
Well, I'm no Harrison Bergeron but I do want people to start examining everything they are presented with. I would hope that every "truth" is treated as a lie, every opinion as bias, every comment viewed as a lie designed to get you to think a certain way. God forbid you start really thinking for yourself. People wonder why we don't have people of stature like the founders now. We do have them but we have created a self-perpetuating system that makes it almost impossible to get such people together. Remember, these men were rebelling against not only British rule but the whole idea of society as it was practiced. We need to find the same kind of people now. People who are not driven by any ideology other than securing opportunity for the most number of people to be the best and attempt the best that they can.
I started this blog with the idea that maybe, just maybe my writing and my ideas find a home outside of dogma. I hope my writing causes people to do some research and never look at broadcast news the same again. Back in the '70s, there was an LA station with the call letters KRHM. One of the DJs was a guy named Skip Weshner. (I actually met him in a Mexican restaurant on Santa Monica Blvd. I was there with a date and we were at the bar waiting for our table and this guy started talking. This was in the '80s and based on what he was saying, I asked if he had ever heard of Skip. I almost fell over when he said that he was one in the same so I started buying him drinks and we talked until the place closed. My date was not happy but so goes life. Skip was more interesting.) At any rate, Skip was relieved of his position because the station had either been sold or was reinventing itself as something like KKDJ or something like that. I happened to like Skip because his show was eclectic. He played all kinds of music and would mix opera with hillbilly with jazz with ethnic. His last broadcast, he let loose with a diatribe I'll never forget. He blasted the FCC, commercial radio and the broadcasting business in general. His point: You think you are free and you think you have choice but in reality, everything is controlled. Even such alternative outlets as the Pacific group which includes KPFA, KPFK and a few others is controlled by politics of one kind or another. In other words, everything is self censored in some way.
Skip, in his own way, was emulating Harrison. I don't expect to do that but I would, again, hope my pieces cause people to examine what is going on around them with such a critical ear and eye that they start seeing the BS they are being fed as news. George Washington wrote that, (I'm paraphrasing) "All in all, truth is the best course." I don't know about truth but do know about facts. I'll leave finding truth to the philosophers. But I can certainly point out where I think we are being misled intentionally and I hope people change their lives by engaging in self discovery.
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