News: News sux

Originally posted June 24, 2009:

I keep a feed on my home page that gives me what they believe to be the top headlines of the day. I must stress “they believe”, as I am wary anytime an outside organization does such explicit and blatant filtering of the news. I did this because at one time I believe that it would provide a font of wisdom into the workings of the world at large, elevating my view of the world.

That was an epic fail.

There are a number of reasons that I do not take the most popular news sources very seriously. For one, they tend to be owned by large conglomerate corporations. And large corporations, by definition, have one goal: make the most money by whatever means possible. And if this means manipulation at the expense of journalistic integrity, then so be it.

And this doesn’t have to be an explicit lieing. One of the most annoying, yet effective, strategies is for news organizations to focus on completely idiocitic and distracting issues. I swear, in the last 4 hours, I have seen about 3 different stories come up about the sex scandal regarding South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. You know what, I don’t fucking care if he sodomized with dozen prostitutesa hot poker while snorting cocaine off the horse’s nutsack. It’s not a political issue in any shape or form. It doesn’t affect policy, and it doesn’t affect stated role of goverment of bettering citizen’s lives (I must stress “stated role” in this context).

I strongly suspect that news organizations focus on distracting issues such as sex scandals and the break up of “Jon and Kate” because it allows corporations to continue to get along without public scruitinty. If everyone is crying because of some side issue, if news reporters are too busy trying to ask why a govener would have sex with a woman in Brazil, then these people don’t pay attention to issues that matter. Stop asking President Obama why he smokes. Fuck, you should be grilling him on health care, on troops in Iraq, on troops in every other part of the world, on climate change, on worker’s rights, on renewable energy, on corporate influence in the goverment. Why is the richest country in the world unable to help its poor, educate its young and care for its old? He should be reaching for something stronger than tobacco.