The Media Are Us

It used to be fashionable to ask Miss America contestants if they thought the media was to blame mounting violence in society. The young woman's reply was always no, she didn't think so, and she came up with some alternative indictment of parents, or schools, or even a crisis in faith.

I was thinking about this the other day as I watched the Murdoch debacle and the demise of the News of the World, and I realized that if I were to turn back the clock and suddenly become nubile while still keeping my experience of years of living, I would beg to differ. Yes, Mr. Parks (that's how far back I go), I would say, the media have a good-sized share of the blame, but so do we all who lapped up squidgy-gate and the rather vulgar conversations between Prince Charles and Camilla.  Wherever did we think they got this stuff? We didn't ask because we wanted to know and, after all, they were the wealthy and privileged and it's their duty in life to entertain us. It only counts when the media do it to "ordinary people" like us.

But I'm going to go further and also say that the media have a good sized chunk of the responsibility for the roiling anger consuming this country. The media does not come out (usually) to promote political agendas on the front page. Such opinions are supposedly by-lined and put on the editorial pages, where people can pick and choose which op ed pieces confirm their own prejudices.

But there are  subtle ways that the news on the front page can appear to be objective while still presenting a politically slanted view. Let me explain. When I taught college English, I used to tell my students the story of a car accident that supposedly occurred at the bottom of the campus. One car broadsided another. At first I told them that one of the drivers was in his late 80s, just returning from a visit to the doctor's office. The other car was driven by a man in his twenties. Speed was not considered a fctor.

Who might they think was to blame? The wisest ones, onto my ploy, said they didn't know enough. I caught a good number of them assuming that the senior driver was "probably" to blame because everyone "knows" that serniors have declining driving skills.

All right, I'd say, here's some more: the 20 year old driver had a suspended license, there were three other men in the car with him, one of them was partially undresssed, and there were beer cans on the back floor.
My students looked a bit ashamed but then went on to do the same thing. Now, it looked like the younger folk were to blame.

The devil was in the details provided and withheld.  And it happens to us all the time if we rely on the media for our information instead of looking more deeply ourselves.

On Tuesday, July 12, The Denver Post ran a front page story with the headline "Draft Ramps Up Kid Rules: The Child-care Lincensing Plan's Focus on Quality Meets Quikc Skepticism."  The lead paragraph stressed that the proposed (note: only proposed) rules would "impose (notice that word) sweeping changes on Colorado Licensed child-care centers." The second paragraph quoted "some" child care operators as saying the proposed changes were a "vast overreach." The next paragraph named the operator of three centers who didn't say anything about the overreach business but commented that health and safety needed to be balanced with quality and that there be some flexibility.

By then, all those opposed to government intervention in anything were probably thumping their chair arms and yelling about damned government sticking its nose into everything.  This would probably produce a very nice rant if the reader was a tea-bagger, meaning that he or she was probably not going to read the rest of the story on 7A buried inside.  Now, on  that equivalent of a back page, we learned that the proposals are a draft to be negotiated by the parties involved and that many of the suggested policies were recommended by childcare operators themselves because Colorado is one of bottom states when it comes to regulating early child-care providers.

Looks different doesn't it? The devil was in the order of the details in this account and since the "balance" didn't come until the end, one must conclude that the writer intended to stir things up. In other words, we were snookered and it was a non-story. However, the next day, the Post ran an editorial no less saying that the draft policies went too far as if the story had been credible and only the media reporting had "saved" the day.

Having actually served on some of these committees to propose anything, I know how they work. You throw everything in but the kitchen sink so it can all be negotiated and people can work together as a team to discard anything really unreasonable. That is how democracy and consensus work. In this case, though, the media picked out the controversy, played it up irresponsibly to sell papers, and by doing so fanned the flames of division.  Who needs enemies when you have media fighting for readership?

But let's be honest. We get the media we deserve. If we aren't willing to educate ourselves to look skeptically at what is presented to us as fact and if we aren't willing to embrace even a rudimentary form of intellectual engagement with the world--and we're seeing mounting evidence that many of us are not--then we are going to continue being presented with gossip masquerading as truth. Shame on us for settling for this.

What Manner of Insanity?

I find myself more than discouraged these days--I am actually sickened by the sight of small minds and petty unkindness trying to force itself upon humanity. I am left to wonder what manner of insanity has fallen on this country that urges people to force their will on others in the name of pesonal and repressive theocracies which all too often take the form of repression against women.

Why women? In many societites women are property. They are hidden under veils to prevent men other than their husbands coveting them, mutilated so they are not tempted to enjoy sex, stoned to death when they violate any male-created taboos, uneducated so they are not tempted into independence, and made to understand that their only value is in producing children. If men could have their own children, women would probably be killed at birth. 

Let anyone believe I am talking only about the Middle East, which is only the most obvious example of this, we need only to take a look at our own southern and midwestern states, the bastion of political repression and the glorious old Righty values thrust at us by the moral arbiters of "American Values."

Yes, the Righties want a balanced budget--how moral. Yet they plan to have this budget balance by cutting programs for the poor, most of which serve women--those rogues who have been abandoned by their husbands (must have been for cause) and those whom they want to believe are in the country illegally (they  creep across the border, dodging the cacti, just so they can go to US emergency rooms to have anchor babies and rack up our national debt.) 

 Now--I don't mind paying my 18% even if it does go to these "undesirables" but I resent like hell watching super-rich Richties calling for a balanced budget where they are not even on the seesaw. That makes their idea of a balanced budget something theoretical, something to be done by others while they defend paying not a cent and claiming that they "deserve" their money. When they divorce, their settlements run in the millions. When the poor divorce, the women head down into poverty.

Wanting to cut the programs that serve the poor and women shows the real motivation of the Right. They just don't like the poor and they positively froth over women who produce children in poverty, all the while wanting to deny them abortions even in the case of rape. They do this without even trying to recognize that not every woman served by the programs they want to cut is minority, trying to play the system, or popping out welfare babies (remember Reagan?). A whole lot of these women have been abandoned and not by other women. Yet, the Righties want to cut the education that might make these women independent and they want to deny them information about reproduction that might limit unwanted pregnancies.

Anyone? Does this make sense?

Unfortunately, the rhetoric of the Right is nothing new. Every society has beaten up on its women. So why am I so discouraged by something that predicatably recurs? I have to say it's political and it has to do with the matter of will. Right now I have no trust in our political leadership to do the right thing.

Governing a nation as diverse as this one requires leadership to do what is right, not what is ideologically pure. We aren't on the frontier any more. The values that allowed people to fight off bears is not what's needed in an overpopulated world.  I want a president who takes a stand. I want to see leadership into the 21 Century not into the 19th.

We have a problem with illegal immigration. Instead of building walls that keep no one out, drop the judgmental nonsense and fix the problem once and for all. If it means issuing work visas, be pragmatic and do it. Quit the self-righteous pontificating. So a lot of people don't like abortion--they also don't like supporting unwanted children. Get over it. No one is forcing anyone to have one and the decision to have one is tragic--leave the woman alone. So people don't like gay marriage. We no longer live in a society that encourages people to have 15 children to populate the country. We don't need more families. The gays are doing us a favor. When they want families, they adopt the neediest children among. Let them have whatever they need to raise these children and if it's marriage to protect their families, so be it.

I want a president who understands the world has changed and doesn't try to conciliate these idiots who still want to live back in the 1800s.  President Obama: please stop trying to be a community organizer. These people are too dangerous to deal with. Please start looking at what this country needs to be a civilized nation in the 21st Century. And please stop pandering to the worst among us.