"News" You Don't Need

It’s a typical day here in the coastal Paradise, sun coming up and birds chirping. As 8:00 A.M. approaches, traffic on Milpas Street picks up, parents and students heading for the high school. The Mexican man who lives in the apartment complex behind us coaxes his battered blue GMC truck to life; one of these days he’ll get around to replacing the muffler.

I’m standing at the kitchen counter, eating oatmeal and reading the latest Vanity Fair, marveling at how fake the cover photo of the chicks from Desperate Housewives appears. Vanity Fair is filled with photographs of impossibly beautiful people one rarely, if ever, sees in everyday life.

I finally find the article I want to read, an excerpt from Robert F. Kennedy JR’s book entitled: “Crimes Against Nature,” that laments, among other things, the decline of American journalism and the consequences for Democracy in this country.

This is a topic I’ve long been interested in, particularly the standard characterization that the American media has a “liberal” bias. The charge is absurd on its face, a creation of the right-wing of the Republican Party. A quick examination of media ownership in this country disproves the accusation. Rather than a liberal bias, the American media has a “corporate” bias, and anyone who claims otherwise is a pinhead.

The Right dominates the public airwaves, both radio and television, to such an extent that what most Americans see and hear resembles Journalism about as much as a miniature poodle resembles a Great Dane. Limbaugh, Hannity, Liddy, et al echo the Party line and one another. Meanwhile, the once formidable major networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS – have gutted their news divisions in order to transform them into profit centers. They are driven not by what’s important news for citizens to know and grasp, but by what attracts the largest possible audience in a given time slot.

One of the major networks had a slogan a few years back that went something like: News You Can Use from People You Can Count On.”

The slogan should now read: “News You Don’t Need from People Who Don’t Care.”

Frankly, I don’t know how ol’ Charlie Gibson gets up every morning and puts his happy face on and goes into the studio and reads headlines like, “Does Peanut Butter Cure Hiccups?” America wants to know.

Jesus, you spend your professional career in the journalistic trenches, working on stories of real significance, and in the twilight of your career find yourself reduced to reporting on the nexus between peanut butter and hiccups. If Gibson had any integrity or self-respect, he’d tell his corporate bosses to fuck off and retire.

Not to be outdone by peanut butter and hiccups, or the strange, isolated case of a severed finger showing up in a can of chili, the Today Show on NBC played Infotainment with this earth-shaking query: What Do Garden Gnomes Protect?

That question has troubled me for years and I’m glad NBC finally put the issue to rest. Thank you Matt and Katie.

I think what RFK JR. was trying to say is that we are royally Fucked, and if you need proof, look no further than the last election. Dubya’s record of incompetence and failure was a mile long and should have qualified him for an early retirement to his Texas ranch – and if not for the Right’s media machine, that’s exactly what would have happened. Bush supporters voted as if they were blind, deaf, and dumb, believing for instance, that WMD had been found in Iraq, believing that there was a verifiable tie between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, believing that Bush is an honest man with a big heart, who takes direction from Jesus and is not in the pocket of Big Business.

Consider Ohio, a state battered by Bush’s disastrous tax and trade policies, where large numbers of voters marched to the polls and voted against their own economic interests.

The Right has the upper hand politically and economically, the two sectors feeding and supporting one another, backed by an efficient propaganda machine to spin their point-of-view to the easily misled dunces in the heartland. The Left is disorganized and has no competing philosophy or message to offer, so for those of us who consider ourselves liberals or progressives, it’s a bleak time with only occasional flashes of light.

But sooner or later, when the economy is completely in the toilet and the Chinese are buying Euros instead of dollars, and the Republicans have fouled the air and raped the land – or invaded another Middle Eastern nation – people will wake up and run the Right wingers back into the cellar where they belong.