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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, September 11, 2009

The Most Trusted Name In Yellow Journalism 

...I was bustling around in a motel room this morning in Ashland, Oregon, with CNN as background noise as the family and I packed up to head back home after a couple of days catching performances at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when this suddenly became Breaking News. All progress toward getting checked out ground to a halt and we watched a strange, scary, gripping drama play out into...well...into nothing other than another desperate and misguided scramble to be first to the screen in the wildly competitive cable news market with The Hot News Of The Moment, regardless of whether that "News" is meaningful, relevant, or even actually true...

My first thought on the realization that there was no "there" there was that I, too, would defend company reporting skills and techniques the way Kyra Philips did, for no other reason than to try to divert the embarrassment of the moment in some other direction. My second thought was a remembrance of those crazy Paula/Monica days during the wet, ugly spring and hot, humid summer of 1998 when it seemed that every news cycle seemed to feature the confessions of yet another woman who had dallied with the President of The United States, none of which proved to be true even though they received at least one news cycle of credence...

A Story From My Life: a few years ago while I was driving around out in the woods on the Eastern slope of the Orygun Cascades, my FedBorg truck radio (programmed to hear both my agency's transmissions and to scan those of surrounding local, county, state, and federal jurisdictions) began spilling out a gripping drama. One of the tour boat plying the waters of Crater Lake National Park thirty miles to the south of my location had struck some sort of underwater obstruction and was sinking. Tourists were in the water and at least one of them was experiencing medical problems that looked like a heart attack. The other tour boat was ordered to deploy to the site to begin attempting a rescue, while National Park Service fire crews were directed to the Cleetwood Cove Trailhead to prepare to carry casualties out to the North Rim and requests were made for Medivac helicopters from both Bend and Medford...

I was wildly punching the AM/FM dash radio buttons, trying to find some sort of report on this developing story, all the while debating on whether or not to make a cell call to the office to let my coworkers know that they may have some sort of emergency response to address. That dilemma was solved when a voice came over the spied-upon frequency to announce - just as that star-crossed tour boat must be slipping with a grim finality beneath the crystal-blue waters of Crater Lake - that "this portion of the exercise has now ended" and that "the second segment of the exercise will begin at 1300 hours at..."

Hearing chatter on a frequency that isn't yours is to just hear noise. I knew that already, but it was instructive to be reacquainted with this lesson in that moment. Failure to exercise due journalistic diligence with regard to chatter heard on a frequency that isn't yours is another matter altogether when we are talking about one of the big-time 24/7 cable news networks; at the very least, it is simply sloppy work on any old average day, and to engage in such a failure on the eight Nine/Eleven anniversary is to show - once again - why the depths of the failure of the Fourth Estate have not yet been plumbed...

The saddest part of this sad failure of journalistic responsibility is that nobody from CNN will lose his or her job for failing to engage in actual journalism, but some career member (or several career members) of the Coast Guard will lose his or her job for failing to anticipate that CNN employees would fail to be 'journalists' in any true sense of the term. In the "he said/she said" world in which we live, there is plenty of blame to share, but the bottom line is that CNN failed and, in it's failure, caused problems that didn't need to ever happen...

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Posted by: Jack K. / 7:53 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Wherein I Ask Myself "Why Bother?"...And Struggle For An Answer 

...most of the reason that I have blogging so infrequently over the last few weeks can be found in the reality-based aspects of real life. Won't bore you with the details; wouldn't be right. But beyond all that real life going on in the background, I have to confess that there are nights when I really wonder why I should even care anymore (and, to be specific, I only do this because of wonkish caring and a bit of personal therapy; I have understood since I first slipped into this vicious blog posting addiction over seven years ago in a far different place and time that it was really all about me and my need to vent)...

Let it be sufficient to say that I am frustrated...and, dare I day it...bored beyond a level that I would ever have calculated a long-time politics wonk like me could ever get to, and it is all because of the current health care debate. Sadly; ironically, even, given the place we should have arrived at finally after all those long dark years in a grim cold wilderness of Republican dominance and what all that meant, it is the party for which I always color in the little box with my No. 2 pencil out here on the ultra-conservative Eastern Cascade slope of "vote-by-mail" Oregon. It's the majority party Democrats who have finally made me feel old and tired and wondering why I should bother...

Penalties for people at three times the poverty rate who don't go out and get health insurance, coupled with the lack of a public option of health coverage that would make the health insurance giants play an honest pricing game, is - and let us be absolutely precise, circumspect, and genteel about this - pure, unadulterated evil. That it is being proposed by conservative Democrats, who have made more noise than I ever want to hear for the rest of my life about not delving into Socialist 'big government' programs, truly demonstrates that these odd creatures were not able to pass through the Looking Glass with anything approaching Alice's ease suffered serious, debilitation brain slashes from all those broken shards...

I understand, and have frequently argued, that the pure idea of a "Democratic Majority" wasn't all that progressives might thing it was cracked up to be. Democrats can get elected to the Senate in some states and to the House in some districts because they look a lot more like Republicans than the sort of Democrat that the modern party could recognize. That's fine as far as it goes, and the simple existence of Blue Dogs and the DLC are products of that particular political reality; sometimes, no matter how much you scrinch up your eyes and wish and hope and pray, the reality is that you can get "more" Democrats or "better" Democrats, but your chances of getting both at the same time are unlikely in a host of states and districts, where the vote is predicated more on current political tides and less on what needs to be considered a generally failed Democratic ability to articulate or defend anything resembling progressive values...

Were I a betting man, I would place the milk money on this whole exercies being just one more failed effort at health care/insurance reform. In my most positive moments (which are becoming fewer and farther between), though I am not a betting man, I just might be persuaded to lay down some cash on the less risky proposition that whatever does emerge will at best be meaningless for most Americans and at worst be little more than a windfall for an insurance industry that will do whatever it takes to maintain as much of the current status as possible. It may well be that, as conservative talking heads insist, that most Americans are all good with their health care insurance, but this was never about them in any case. The whole thing was supposed to be about those Americans who didn't have insurance or lost it through job loss, or lost it as a result of rescission. We have officially lost our way in this whole debate, and it is mostly the fault - by either omission or commission - of people who claim to be Democrats...

Somewhere out there, far beyond the insulated, calculating world of big-time politics and big political money, there are places where where pure simple reason resides. It resides with the little people who don't have blogs or talking heads or lobbyists. That place doesn't have a voice, though; its concerns are getting lost in the current "debate", and it is entirely the fault of the Democratic party that this particular voice is lost. That's what is finally making me feel tired and old; that is what, finally, makes me wonder why I should ever again bother to waste my time advocating traditional Democratic causes like health care for all of our citizens, when even a certain significant subset of elected Democrats don't seem to care about these traditional Democratic causes...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:09 PM 0 comments

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