The High Price of Gas, John McSame, And Why You Should Never Trust Anyone Over The Age Of Twelve.
With the relatively new (Bush Crime Family Era) High Cost of Everything Reality we have been hit by these days, it seemed appropriate to write something about Gasoline prices in particular. What prompted me to talk about this specific subject was a piece I watched on the Countdown With Keith Olbermann show a couple of days ago. It was all about John McCain and his connection to the now defunct Enron Corporation, many of his current campaign advisers, and the loop hole that allowed Enron to rape California with outrageous Megawatt prices, and now Big Oil, to artificially cranked up the price of oil. Yet, it doesn’t just stop with these guys, one must look to Wall Street as well, in particular, Speculators who are currently raking in millions from Oil Futures. All of it going un-checked by the very people we appointed to protect and serve us: Politicians. (You can throw some blame onto most of the media as well, for simply not bothering to report any real news anymore). This gaping hole in our financial system is aptly named the Enron Loophole.
There are three general reasons for the price of oil to be so high right now:
- A very de-valued U.S. Dollar against other currencies.
- Speculators on Wall Street.
The Olbermann report is one of the best explanations about the little known Enron Loophole, and the free pass given to Wall Street yet again.
The reason why most people don’t understand why all these things can happen is simply because the Main Stream Media has no real interest in reporting all the facts and nuances of any given story. Back in the day of old, print media could write out long exposes on particular stories. The message was generally credible and to the point. Most people got their news from the newspapers and periodicals. Nowadays, most people get their news, if they care or get it at all, from Television. Television news is basically short, out of context sound bites, usually of one little inane part of a much bigger issue spoon feed through junk food-like shock points, played over and over and over again, ad-nauseam. The purpose is to never resolve the issue for viewers, it is designed to string us along with controversy, real or contrived, skirting the border of tabloid pulp. Most issues are understood by the public in this very shallow way. Yet even when someone within that genre attempts to spell it out more precisely, as Keith Olberman usually attempts to do, it just doesn’t ever seem to resonate with the public at large. Our attention span is just too damaged. We are way too conditioned to be able to pay attention to the details, even when served up in only slightly bigger portions.
1 comment:
The advent of 24 hour cable news networks in the 1980s definitely played a big part in the media's tendency towards soundbite journalism for short attention spans (how many tickers and sidebars are we up to at this point, anyway?), but I think the Internet-led advent of the Information Age plays into it too. I actually posted about this a few days ago when talking about methodology for reviewing cartoons, but this story I heard posits that the Internet encourages us to "click and skim" rather than "read and think," which "inhibits our ability to read longer books and articles." Agree or disagree as you may, but my personal experience shows there's some truth to that, which in turn affects the media I consume and, by proxy, my political views. Nothing sticks anymore. Nothing of note, anyway.
That said, I think you're spot-on regarding that people generally aren't being informed with what they need to know by the press. It takes a lot of "work" to think substantively about how political affairs affect both your day-to-day existence as well as the world you live in, and so there is a strong desire among the general public to have the "correct" answers pre-formulated for their convenience. Or as Jon Stewart puts it, people don't want to deal with all this stuff because we've got shit to do.
That general public apathy is precisely what the media at this point feeds off of and thrives upon to make money and get ratings in lieu of providing worthwhile content. By presenting easy answers and pre-packaged "no critical thought required!" arguments they've been instrumental in pushing the country in a certain direction over the last several years, and nowadays people don't watch the news to actually learn about stuff. They do it to reinforce whatever they already believe; the news is there to remind you of how right whatever you believe is every time you tune in.
Conservatives figured out this magic formula first and they did so decades ago. They realized how unbelievably effective it is to loudly proclaim that you're "telling it like it is" and "calling it right down the middle" because you're "fair and balanced." They figured out when you do that, people will just listen to what you say, never realizing that you have an agenda. For the record, I am very vocal about the fact that I have an agenda.
It's an industry of distraction that's managed to erroneously conflate "objectivity" and "fairness" with "tell both sides of the argument." I don't care how many times other Babylon 5 fans quote that "understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth in between" line: the middle isn't necessarily where the truth is, and it's intellectually lazy to claim otherwise.
For instance, the TV/radio media's coverage of the build up to the Iraq War was pretty much "here's a guy for the war and here's a guy against it! o/~ CROSSFIRE / YOU'LL GET CAUGHT UP IN THE / CROSSFIRE / CROSSFIRE / CROSSFIIIIIIRE! o/~" without actually doing any real work to determine if what one side is saying is remotely true or not. Now they're all refusing to own to their own failures--witness how little coverage there's been regarding the Pentagon paying military analysts to go on TV and argue in favor of the war--and the only way you'd know that even happened was by reading. READING? Who does that? Hell, who even has time to read this post I'm writing now? Fact-checking is so out of style that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are somehow providing more accurate news and more intelligent interviews than the real news at this point.
I like Keith Olbermann, but he's one voice in a sea of countless others, many of which are insane. For crying out loud, Hardball with Chris Matthews is on right before him.
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