Let's be certain of one thing today: Nothing whatever has been going
on on planet Earth for the last couple of days that is worth
interrupting the constant speculation and obsessive concern with the
missing aircraft. There is no armed uprising in Venezuela, escalating
Russian aggression against the Ukraine isn't worth mentioning, and that
the Dow is down nearly 260 points this afternoon is of no consequence
whatever. One of our aircraft is missing, or rather one of Malaysia's
aircraft is along with 200 odd mostly Chinese passengers.
If
any of the other things that go on every day happen to interest you,
CNN doesn't want to be bothered with it and you'll have to tune in to
something like BBC or Al Jazeera where you might learn about the
collapse of the cease fire between Gaza and Israel, the struggle for
democracy in Turkey, a left wing victory in El Salvador, the arrest of
journalists in Egypt. . . you know all that boring stuff that none of
the hip people are interested in when there are celebrities and
calamities carefully selected as the thing we need to hear about to the
exclusion of all else.
No, the proliferation of the
all-news format has resulted in far, far fewer choices and much less
information for Americans and apparently we like it that way.
Entertainment news, infomercials, rumors of scandals and commercials and
one major story at a time, chewed on, speculated on, extrapolated from
endlessly until some other profitably sensational thing comes along to
drown out our interest in the real world as we are led through the
chutes to be fleeced.
While alien/communist/Sasquatch theories abound about the missing plane the world still turns. Even if Faux Noise is sure it's Obama's fault, we'll find out eventually. So yes, I usually watch Al Jazeera if I feel the need to know something about the rest of the planet.
ReplyDeleteReally true, well said. It is harder and harder to find actual news on television, which is why I spend most of the day on Facebook where I read the links my FB friends post, which are real news items from reliable sources!
ReplyDeleteCNN is giving the lost plane Twin Towers coverage. Never have so many talked so long about so few facts.
ReplyDelete‘Their’ plane has citizens of multiple nations on it. The body of water over which the search is being conducted is a hot zone of politics and mass transit. In order to investigate the disappearance, a lot of sensitive military intelligence needs to be shared between countries that have tensions with one another. And for all we know this could be a criminal act with mass fatalities. Terrorism with hundreds of dead hostages. And the need to know whether that is the case or not is critical.
ReplyDeleteThe coverage is obsessive perhaps, the media is like that, but the implications are not trivial.
When 200 ordinary Americans disappear while visiting relatives or on a business trip, and no-one knows what happened to them, rest assured… the rest of us will hold our breath then as well.
No one said it's trivial, but all the stories that aren't being mentioned are not trivial either. "for all we know" everything we don't know could, by definition, be anything at all and the goings on in the Ukraine smell much like other things that have started world wars. We're not choosing some novel for reading on the beach, we're trying to be aware of what's going on in the world and very little of that is ever covered in a country where entertainment value trumps importance.
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