Home » Posts tagged 'news'

Tag Archives: news

It’s a Dog’s Life

Posted on by

I could not believe my eyes. When I woke up this morning, I joined Martine on the living room couch while she was watching the news. Fox news, as it turned out. Somewhere in South Los Angeles, a pedestrian was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The newscasters practically ignored the dead human, spending all their sympathy on the victim’s dog. Much was made of the fact that a good Samaritan had volunteered to take the dog.

In some future newscast, I fully expect to see the dead pedestrian ignored entirely while an ambulance and psychiatrist are called in for the victim’s pet.

Only in America …

Get Ready for Election Nite!

Posted on by

John King and His Magic Chart

Above all else, DON’T WATCH THE NEWS, at least until Thursday or Friday. The way that news channels make money is by instilling fear, You don’t want that. Read a good book. If you absolutely must watch television, tune in to a channel that has no news—like Turner Classic Movies (TCM).

If you have friends who like to discuss politics, AVOID THEM until the weekend. They will be agitated and all too willing to make you feel as terrible as they do.

DON’T VOTE IN PERSON. You will be in line with hundreds of agitated people; and you may run into people who openly express contempt for your political choices.

STAY AWAY FROM SOCIAL MEDIA. It’s an instrument of the devil and his tools: Zuckerberg, Musk, et al.

Be extra good to yourself and the people you love. Eat foods you like. Once you’ve voted, just distance yourself from the whole process. And whatever you do, DON’T GIVE MONEY TO POLITICIANS. It only encourages them.

Avoid posting political signs or bumper stickers. Stay away from political rallies. Don’t wear any red baseball caps made in China.

You might just want to lock yourself in the closet. It’s going to be a rough week.

Tomorrow’s Mug Shots

Posted on by

Trump “Rally” in Grand Rapids, MI

As we head toward the culmination of another anxious election season, I suddenly had an inkling of what could happen. Donald Trump has always relied on rallies where he speaks with a bigly group of mostly young supporters with posters and MAGA hats at his back.

These rallies vaguely resemble the rallies that Trump’s hero, Adolph Hitler, staged in the 1930s. Of course, they couldn’t hold a candle to the giant 1935 rally in Nuremberg which was filmed by Leni Riefenstahl and released under the title Triumph of the Will. Now that was a real rally, with over 700,000 supporters in attendance.

Hitler Rally in Nuremberg 1935

The thought came to me that the whole Trump moment in American history will end badly. The electorate is largely made up of two groups:

  • People who hate Trump with a passion
  • People who idolize Trump with a passion (but who will come to hate him when they wake up and find out they have been used)

What I think will happen at some future date is that those faces at MAGA rallies will become a mark of shame, and that people will scan photographs of the rallies with magnifying glasses to find neighbors they could blame for their predicament, which will probably get worse over time. (Even if it doesn’t, the voters will think that.)

I look at cars that bear political bumper stickers and think, “What happens if they park their car in a neighborhood which is strongly ‘anti-’ their candidate?” That’s one of the reasons my car is devoid of bumper stickers and decals.

The blame game will only get worse.

Somebody Sez

Posted on by

To begin with, I am not a great lover of the news media. In fact, I believe that if somebody wants to have a good night’s sleep, they should not watch or listen to the news after dinner. And certainly not the eleven o’clock news just before bedtime. It’s just not healthy, because those news outlets are peddling fear or outrage as their primary product.

One example is what I call the “Somebody Sez” news story. Just to give you an example, here are a number of headlines I just gleaned from the Cable News Network (CNN) website tonight:

  • Biden could face obstacle getting on Ohio’s ballot, secretary of state’s office says
  • Retired judge says statute cited in Trump’s motion raises concerns about NY judge
  • Republican lawmaker says Russian propaganda has ‘infected a good chunk’ of GOP base
  • Retired US general predicts Israel’s withdrawal won’t prevent an invasion
  • Republican strategist says Trump has made a critical mistake in the campaign

CNN apparently relies on an army of “experts” who “say” certain things or “predict” certain outcomes. It is possible that none of these things come true, but they can certainly succeed in riling up the consumers of the news.

Let’s take a more biased news medium, the Salon.Com website. Its readership obviously does not wish Trump well. (Neither do I, for that matter.) But its page today bristles with chatty “experts”:

  • “Punk”: Don Winslow on Donald Trump
  • “This is a big deal”: Experts say Judge Cannon’s order signals “bad news” for fate of Trump case
  • “Things just got very real”: Legal experts say Jack Smith appeal threat “puts Cannon on notice”
  • “Trump is running scared”: Legal experts slam “harebrained” scheme to get NY judge to recuse
  • Profs: Trump ruling unlocks key evidence
  • Experts “very worried” at Cannon’s order

People, it’s not news until it actually happens.

It is possible for editors to avoid this type of rampant supposition. For example, I could find no examples of blabbing experts in the NBC or CBS news sites. Apparently, they are more interested in reporting the news rather than creating it.

Too Much and Not Enough

Posted on by

Heavy Rain in Southern California

Is it time to turn on the news yet? And when it is, what do you expect to hear? I don’t know about you, but I have come to the conclusion that the purpose of the news is to sell advertising by making the viewers fearful, such that they will want to be “informed” on the latest developments and continue to come back for more.

I have been asked by several friends outside of California whether I have “survived” the rainstorms that have hit the state this month. Evidently, I have, as I am writing this blog.

Southern California weather news can be illustrated by the following Venn diagram:

The blue circle indicates that “there has been too much rain”; the yellow circle, that “there has not been enough rain.” And what about the pale green zone where the two circles intersect? That’s when some weather reports are saying “there has been too much rain” and some others are saying that “there has not been enough rain”—at the same time!

At the same time we have been bombarded by reports of too much rain, there have been numerous stories that now a La Nina weather pattern is being established and that soon we will not be getting enough rain.

Apparently, there is no such thing as “just the right amount of rain.” It’s always a case of too much or not enough.

My suggestion for all of you: Try not to turn on the news just before going to bed. It will play havoc with your sleep.

Cabined, Cribbed, and Confined

Posted on by

The News Has Not Always Been a Major Part of Our Lives

When I was growing up, the news on television was not the major production it is today. There were Walter Cronkite, John Cameron Swayze, John Chancellor, Dan Rather, and a handful of other mostly White males who spent thirty to sixty minutes telling us what was happening around the world.

Now the news is televised 24 hours a day on several channels. We are lured in with graphics indicating Breaking News, even when it isn’t. Watch a news channel for an hour, and what you get in thin gruel with one major component: F-E-A-R.

If you watch the news shortly before going to bed, you will have a difficult time falling asleep. There will be dire suppositions and wild guesses. I am reminded of these lines from Macbeth in which the uneasy king speaks:

          I had else been perfect,
Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,
As broad and general as the casing air.
But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears.

To which I reply with a quote from Calvin Coolidge, which I use frequently: “If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.” If the various news media took that to heart, they would lose most of their viewers. Instead, they are in the business of magnifying our fears and even creating new ones.

Just imagine how many stressors they have at their command: Iran, Russia, China, Israel, the Middle East, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, global warming, drought, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, cryptocurrencies, immigration, Covid-19, Trump, Biden, tomorrow’s rain, traffic, and so on ad infinitum.

Even the newspapers will scare you with a story. What you think happened in your town actually happened in (frantically skip to page 8) Somalia.

What is the best way to cope with the news? My suggestion is never to watch the news on TV in the evening. Rather, read about it using the Internet and print media during the earlier part of the day. After all, it is a lot better to go to sleep with a smile on your face than shaking with dread.

Jane, You Ignorant Slut!

Posted on by

Saturday Night Live Had It Right Way Back Then

Early in the 1970s, CBS’ Sixty Minutes news show had a segment in which a liberal debated a conservative. I could just imagine that CBS News was all thrilled they they were being “fair and balanced.” Then, Saturday Night Live parodied the segment with Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd, with Dan always opening with, “Jane, you ignorant slut ….”

That same genuflection to “fair and balanced” reporting results in segments where the political philosophy (?!) of QAnon is discussed with the same seriousness as the Federal budget. Attempts are made to mirror all sides of an issue, even when the one of the sides has (1) no merit, (2) no appreciable following, (3) dangerous repercussions to the nation. If you can’t find an articulate spokesman, there’s always of the more incendiary members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz. Hell, you can always find some bozo in a Missouri coffee shop whose word the media will treat as if they were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai.

The misguided attempt to treat all sides of an issue as having equal merit has resulted in the public not knowing where to turn. That was certainly the case in the days of the Tea Party a few years ago, and still an issue when some bonehead in or out of office says something flagrantly stupid that is picked up by the press and widely disseminated.

So many news stories are picked up from Twitter (or X or whatever) and splashed around because they sound likely to result in fear or outrage. Trump’s tweets were certainly in this category. And we all know that even if he had no idea of how to run the country, our former president certainly knew how to manipulate the media.

Nowadays I am not likely to give any credence to political farts from the right or left. I don’t care what some Texas congressman or Trumpian fellow traveler has to say. My life is too valuable to allow myself to be crassly manipulated by people I do not in any way respect.

The Neverending Story

Posted on by

If your prime source for news is the boob tube, prepare to be not only misinformed but bored out of your skull. Under the pretext of imparting late-breaking news, you will have to put up with endless repetition—to such an extent that you will be unsure that this is an entirely new mass shooting or the same old one that everyone is deploring. Those bodies in the streets in the Ukraine—are they new, or the same old bodies? I mean, how can you tell?

This is particularly a problem when there is a BIG STORY, such as the Ukraine War, the January 6 Insurrection, the New York subway shooting, or Donald J. Trump’s latest con.

I am going to propose something radical to prevent you from not only wasting your time but getting so tense that you can’t sleep. It consists of one word: WAIT.

Avoid being tied to the 24/7 news circle jerk from the corporations that run the major news channels. WAIT and READ when the news becomes available in newspapers, or, even better, weekly or biweekly or monthly periodicals. The best news stories I ever read were typically in The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books. By the time the story reaches the print media, some of the dross that takes up so much time is shaken out and you are able to better understand what is happening.

Avoid getting your news from YouTube, FaceBook, or most other Internet sources. There, the news is more frequently coated with a thick, indigestible layer of opinion like a fried chicken leg that is all breading. You want to understand what is happening, not what some Internet influencer wants you to think. Avoid getting stuck in some Internet news bubble. You’re here to learn, not to get force-fed by someone who has an axe to grind.

Plague Diary 9: Chinese Virus Torture

Posted on by | 4 Comments

LA Times Photo of Bus Riders

Looking back on yesterday’s very pessimistic post, I wish I had not posted it. And while I’m in an apologizing mood, I wish I had not used the title “Chinese Virus Torture” for this post—except, as you will see, it is oddly appropriate.

While I could see that COVID-19 is the news story of the century, I am appalled that the news media are pre-empting all other news to strike heavily and again and again and again on the subject of the virus. Almost as if it were a form of Chinese water torture. (I will not otherwise use the racist term Chinese Virus, much beloved of our Orange Führer.)

I think that, at this time, people should learn to laugh again, to remember that, yes, there will be life after the coronavirus slinks away. Other than five or six basic facts such as washing your hands, maintaining social distance, etc., there really isn’t much else to be said. When the broadcast media become all virus all the time, the result is to strike fear among the population.

When toilet paper suddenly disappears from the shelves of our supermarkets, it is an indicator that the news media is presenting an out of balance picture that creates an environment of irrationality and panic.

If I were in charge of programming, I would not replace the endless news cycle with some entertainment. Right now, it is difficult to avoid the talking heads drumming death into our eyes and ears.

The mess we are in is going to last a while. My post yesterday was a sign that the virus news hammer was starting to get to me. Today I feel a little bit better.

 

 

 

No-News Booze Cruise

Posted on by

It’s That Time Again

I suspect that one of the reason so many Americans don’t vote is that politics as practiced in these United States is so divisive and utterly ugsome. With the many 24-hour news channels hammering into our brains and all the phone calls and TV ads, we all look forward wistfully to the day after the November elections—provided that we don’t have another 2016 debacle on our hands.

The above cartoon was in today’s Los Angeles Times in Wiley Miller’s underrated “Non Sequitur” comic strip. I laughed as I thought about the endless Democratic debates and the never-ending tweets of our orange-headed troll of a president. Treating our obsession with the news as an info-virus was a stroke of genius.

When I spent election day 2016 in Quito, Ecuador, I thought I was being smart. Instead, learning that Trump won, I seriously considered for a few minutes staying in South America, but I did return to the mess that greeted me when I returned to our borders.

In recent weeks, there are some of my friends with whom I refuse to discuss politics. I just mutter something about endlessly covering “Subject A” and hurriedly trying (not always successfully) to change the subject.