I guarantee that at some point this week, Greta Van Sustren will ask someone in Aruba if their investigation has been altered by the presence of Hurricane Katrina.
Why, oh why, is cable news the furthest thing from real news there is? I would expect the
Us Weekly treatment of celebs from VH-1, the
People-esque celeb-worship of E!, and the over-the-top, news-as-tabloid reporting style from Geraldo Rivera. But when did Jon Stewart become the only reliable newsman in the business? He doesn't even report the news, for gods' sake!
I'm particularly distressed because we're not just talking about Fox News here. CNN has an article on its website that links to a video story: "Worst Case Scenario: Lake New Orleans." What the hell is that? Okay, let's review here, people: Worst-case scenarios are exactly that--the WORST that could happen. That doesn't make it NEWS. What makes something NEWS is the facts--what's actually happening.
I mean, the comparisons between Rupert Murdoch and Charlie Kane notwithstanding, I just can't understand how so-called journalists can sleep at night any longer. Brit Hume is a propaganda machine. Greta Van Sustren cares more about missing white girls than semi-treasonous White House aids (or, apparently, missing black girls). Everyone from CNN is a joke; it's like they're taking their talking points directly from the Murdochian outline. Even MSNBC, with the witty Keith Olbermann and the oft-entertaining Dan Abrams, has gone the way of the Foxes, with Abrams selling out to Sustrenesque Aruba-baiting while Olbermann has been in a relative lull since his genius "Michael Jackson Puppet Theatre" segments of earlier this year.
And then there's Bill O'Reilly. I really used to respect this guy, and that takes a lot from me, being all liberal and such. But liberal though I may be, O'Reilly's actual NEWS coverage used to legitimately be down-the-line, giving some semblance of truth to what he calls the "No-Spin Zone." I love that idea: News without bias. But it's rarely pulled off...and it's even rarer to find unbiased coverage on the Fox News Channel, since it's the biggest neoconservative and ideological right propaganda machine in history (it even trumps EVERYTHING about the supposedly liberal media--news flash, Ann Coulter and all you So Far Right You Can't Even Criticise Your Own Leaders Anymore neocons: If the media is so damned liberal, why hasn't it called the Bush Administration on ANY of its mistakes? Why hasn't it brought Bush down the way it tried with Nixon and Clinton?). But O'Reilly did his job, and he did it fine.
That was until a few weeks ago, when guest John McCain tried to tell O'Reilly a thing or two about torture: It doesn't work, and it's NEVER justified. O'Reilly tried to tell McCain, a veteran and former P.O.W., that his "friends" have told him that torture works. Okay, again, let's review, everyone who continues to watch this douchebag: O'Reilly's experience being tortured in P.O.W. camps, 0; McCain's experience being tortured in P.O.W. camps, off the scale! Thus, in the fight-to-the-death between O'Reilly's opinion on the U.S. using torture against terror suspects and McCain's, the latter abstolutely descimates the former. O'Reilly, you fucking loser, you can say whatever the hell you want, as is your right by free speech and free press. However, have some common sense and some sense of responsibility for the shit that dribbles out of your mouth, unless you want to become Ann Coulter. Since at least you know how to WRITE (Coulter offends me not because she's a rabidly liberal-hating conservative but because she's a hack writer), I hope it doesn't come to that.
Meanwhile,
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart continues to bring in hoardes of young viewers. But I'm not sure why this should be surprising. I'm also not sure why it's surprising that Jon Stewart is the most trusted anchor in news. People don't trust Stewart because he's funny. They (we) trust him because we know he's not going to bullshit us--something that only could be said about Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, neither of whom will be returning to the broadcast booth. Look at Dan Rather; half of what he said was B.S. Everything that comes out of everyone's mouth on Fox News (including the biggest "liberal" idiot in the country, Alan Combes) is shit. All the "reporters" on CNN are hacks. MSNBC is falling apart at the seams, with Keith Olbermann the only one boasting an opinion that seems to actually speak for all Americans and Ron Reagan being the only person on any cable news network who can ARTICULATE an opinion that isn't either "stay the course" or "I love Jesus."
I once considered becoming a journalist. I may yet do it. But I'm absolutely disgusted by what I see in mainstream media.
I'm just as horrified by what I see in the legitimate liberal media as well. At the Huffington Post last week, I found two articles that were deeply mislabeled, and thus completely crap. One told of John McCain's "endorsing" of teaching "intelligent design" (basically, creationism) in school science classes. The article never said that. In fact, what it said was that McCain said was that theories are okay to discuss in class. That's fine! If some kid brings up creationism, what do you say? "Oh, sorry, Billy, but because we're in a public school, we can't talk about that." Bullshit! I personally think creationism--oh, I'm sorry, "intelligent design"--is the biggest bunch of Evangelical horseshit in the world, but I don't think the way to let kids understand that is to prohibit discussion. No, it should NOT be taught as a legitimate scientific theory in science classes, since there is evidence to support evolution (which follows scientific theory), while there is none to support intelligent design (which means it goes directly against the subject in which Evangelicals desire ID to be taught).
But if little Billy Born-Again has parents who hate gays, think that God should be written into the Constitution, and taught their son that "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth," and if little Billy decides to bring this up and say, "Miss Teacherlady, my parents told me that evolutionary theory is a bunch of monkey crap; they told me that God created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden," I say that a talk about creationism is fair. But it has to be done very carefully.
First of all, the teacher has to make very clear that creationism is NOT a scientific theory. He or she must also explain WHY this is so: ID requires a leap of faith, whereas science's main principle is to test by hypothesis and experimentation. There is nothing wrong with faith; however if scientists throughout history took things on faith, they would never have figured out that death can be avoided--ancient peoples believed that death was punishment from the gods. If scientists took faith over experimentation, we'd still be killing albinos and hare-lips and siamese twins because they're mutants sent as evil spirits (don't believe me? Read Chinua Achebe's phenomenal
Things Fall Apart, one of the finest books ever written).
Second, the teacher has to explain that ID is just one of many faith-based ideas on where humans came from. Some believe in direct contact, meaning God literally created Adam from the earth, Eve from Adam's rib. Others think that some higher power (usually, but not always, the Christian God) tinkered with the building blocks of life, pushing for evolution (this is, for example, what John Paul II said reconciled evolutionary theory, which, he said, had been proven with few doubts, with the idea of God's creation of humankind). It must be noted, of course, that science, while finding much supporting evidence for evolution, has been unable to explain why two seemingly unrelated particles somehow set off a reaction (probably by an electrical burst into the cesspool that held the amino acids) that created the first terrestrial life.
Not that this will be good enough for Evangelicals (or, as they truly are, idealistic neo-Nazis). I'm sorry, but I have to side with Bill Maher on this one: Evangelicals can hope for nothing less than a dictatorship in this country, because they don't want a theocracy--then they can't lead--they want a totalitarian state like the one seen in that "Treehouse of Horror" Simpsons episode "Homer In Time," where Flanders is the unquestioned supreme dictator of the world. Je-diddly-esus for all, eh?
Which brings me back to the hurricane. Twenty bucks says Jerry Falwell tries to blame this (as he did the Tsunami) on the gays and the Pagans. Thing is, I don't know how that's going to work. Every state being hit right now is a so-called Red State (a dubious categorization, in my estimation). New Orleans is so heavily Catholic, their neighborhoods are actually divided by parish, and they're the city that outlawed showing a bare midriff. I don't think any more needs be said about Georgia and Mississippi, and we KNOW about Florida.
Now I may not be gay, but I am a Pagan, and a lot of my friends are gay. Jerry Falwell is a very stupid man. See, he could get so much further by marketing for Weight Watchers than he is marketing Hate for Hicks. "I lost 375 lbs. on the Weight Watchers plan!" the new, 145-lb. Falwell would say in the commercials. He'd be bigger than Fergie (well, literally, too). What a shame he instead falls behind rhetoric that would've made the Pharisees blush.
But what does mainstream media do about the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate?
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Nothing! Oh sure, they'll report what people say, that "Christians are being kept down" said Pat Robertson, or "Christians are just trying to take over public life," said Anthony Romero. But will they foster legitimate debate in this country? Of course not! 'Casue you don't sell newspapers or rope in viewers when you live up to the responsibility carried with a free press.
Just ask Greta Van Sustren. For months, she's been
hot on the case of Natalee Holloway, trying to figure out what happened to this blonde, white, supposedly attractive girl. Just like every major network was a few years ago with Elizabeth Smart.
Now don't get me wrong--I champion Elizabeth Smart, since she was one of the few that got away. But what about the African-American girls (and boys) who've been abducted? As Richard Roeper indicated in one of his recent columns, if you're going to get kidnapped, you'd better be young, white, female, and good looking, or else you'll only get a mention on NPR. Okay, that last bit was mine, but you get the point.
Van Sustren is the latest in a seemingly endless barrage of crap reporting. Nonexistent is her journalistic ethos; we don't hear diddley shit about Karl Rove's latest scandal or Donald Rumsfeld getting booed at Army gatherings. Hell, we don't even hear the typical Fox News rants about how Dick Durbin might as well go have a martini with Osama bin Laden or that Ted Kennedy is a fat man in Stalin's clothing. No, we hear the latest update about how a stray blonde hair was found on a beach in Aruba. Imagine that. It's summertime, schools have only just started going back (and many colleges haven't even begun), and one stray lock of golden hair was found on a beach. Incredible! Pulitzer-prizewinning stuff here! Greta Van Sustren, little girls growing up should idolize
you, because
you and you alone have shown that women need not simply look up to the Diane Sawyers of the world who only want to tell feel-good stories about quintuplets.
Yeesh. Y'know, it's not even like this is a syndrome of
new reporters. Barbara Walters, once revered for being fearless in the face of a male-dominated profession...now, she does
The View. This woman is a
legend, a woman who certainly could be covering the National Conventions or taking over the anchor desk from the dearly departed Peter Jennings. But what is she doing? Gabbing with other women whose rehtorical skills are so below hers that it makes me want to vomit. Meanwhile, ABC News is slowly turning Ted Koppel vehicle
Nightline into a news magazine, while Charlie Gibson, professional though he has been since tentatively taking over the anchor desk for Jennings on
World News Tonight, is force-feeding more about the U.S. than the world, although somehow, I don't think it's his fault.
What the world needs now is Peter Jennings II. We need our world news man, because the world has gotten far too small for our society to rest on an incredible-but-Americentric anchorman like Walter Cronkite; the man was amazing, but he was a domestic man to and through. We need someone telling Americans the news through the eyes of other countries. The eyes of the rest of the world help us understand that we, the United States of America, are a piece of the puzzle--integral to its completion, yes, but still just a piece. In the grand scheme of things, the rest of the world needs us, but
we need the rest of the world.
That's something rarely mentioned on
The NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Williams is competent enough, and could, in fact, be the next Cronkite; he's got personality and charisma, which is more than can be said for anyone on the cable networks. But we don't find that sense of how the
world works in his telecasts.
Since Williams is the only one on network right now who's going to be on for very much longer, it would be disingenuous of me to write about ABC's or CBS's failings of late. That's why I'm hoping that the two networks can figure out some legitimate people to replace their departed anchors. I'm gunning for Ted Koppel on CBS, who'd bring an immediate legitimacy to the oft-maligned
CBS Evening News. ABC, on the other hand, has its major problems, what with losing Jennings and Koppel in the same year. More than likely, the Mouse & Co. will attempt to lure one of the current anchors away from cable news. If that happens, they're going to find themselves left behind by NBC and CBS. If, however, they decide to go with someone risky--perhaps CNN correspondent Miles O'Brien or
World News Now anchor Ron Corning--they'll have a chance to open up the world to viewers in a way that would honor Jennings' legacy.
But chances are they'll go with John "Is Your Teen Addicted To Prescription Medication" Stossell, in which case ABC is officially finished with the legitimate news department.
