Thursday - August 13, 2009

It's on the Radio, it Must be True

I often listen to National Public Radio, unless they have a money begging week on.  I justify this from a need to know my enemy.  The pretentiousness is almost insufferable at times.  I assumed that they were biased, and they are extremely biased, but I also figured that even if they never tell the entire story, at least their half of the story is generally factual – at least to the extent that any mainstream media would be.

But I'm losing even that much confidence in them.  I'm not sure that they're not even in the same category as Dan Rather and CBS who unapologetically fabricated slanderous lies whenever they wished.

Yesterday they had a fluff piece about the Bravo channel.  The agenda of the fluff piece isn't so clear.  They appear to have a running story line the past few weeks of how the intelligentsia have their secret pleasures of watching non-intellectual television shows or reading trashy novels.  Tee hee, aren't they cute?

Bravo channel is a channel pretty much dedicated to convincing us that homosexuals are about 75% of the population.  Maybe that is part of NPR's agenda.  I couldn't say.

On the fluff piece, some executive from Bravo brags about how its audience is the most educated, smartest, most intellectual, trendiest, and wealthiest of any channel on cable television.

This is absurd on its face.  I find it really hard to believe that a show about really bad amateur clothing designers attracts more intelligent people than the science channel.  But Madeline Brand didn't even blink at the claim.

There was probably once a time when "journalists" would check out claims before presenting it as news.  I guess they've trained us quite thoroughly by now and we just expect them to be omniscient.  I suspect that the "journalists" don't have a good sense of reality and it seems perfectly rational to allow Bravo to advertise itself and make such claims without verifying them.  There's something very wrong with that way of thinking.  

"Journalists" like to believe that they control what we know.  Perhaps that was largely true before, but it is no longer.  We no longer have to pretend that "journalism" is a job that requires special training or degree.  Publishing news or investigating truth is something that anyone can do, and we do – all of us on the internet.  There in no need to rely on these bozos anymore.

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