Friday, February 14, 2020

American News Offers Nothing of Value to Society in 2020


2 comments:

Post Alley Crackpot said...

"A lazy person ..."

... doesn't consider the possibility that all inputs are tainted by garbage.

That's partly because one person's "golden source" may also be in part a form of garbage for someone else, but mostly it's the result of how the source material's culled from a free-flowing stream of stuff that would otherwise be on its way to a garbage pile.

Your "news" consists of what some people deemed to be relevant while letting everything else move along without interruption to the garbage pile, and you happened to notice some of those bits.

And so "American news", which is to say the commercial American media product for mass consumption that is being provided through screens, in print, and so forth, offers nothing of value to American society from your point of view because it's garbage that has not been picked over sufficiently to produce much that's worth attention, and that what is being provided is yet more of the garbage you would prefer to ignore.

This is also true of "British news" (especially from the likes of The Grauniad and Thuh Induhpendent), of "French news" (from Le Monde in particular), of "German news" (mit der Lügenpresse), and even "Russian news" (notably when it comes to several of the "shows" of Anglo-American presenters on RT), just to present a few more examples.

You have to realise that many of your "news" sources are low-investment.

Most people have low-investment "opinions" that are actually sentiments and feelings about things and events, and they offer such worthless "news" as making low-investment predictions about What Is To Be Done, Things To Come, and so forth.

In the past, we'd tolerate these things as fiction, such as in the form of HG Wells, but we tolerate them much less when they're being presented with an imperative to React Now or else.

When they're telling you about what they think or what they believe instead of what they observe, possibly complete with a flow of events, charts and graphs, and so forth, all they're doing is providing a low-investment source of something that resembles data.

Which when you combine it with all of the other low-investment sources of something that resembles data, the aggregate slop turns into the type of garbage that you can ignore ...

It would be very surprising if you get actual "news" from anywhere at all.

High-investment credible news sources may be priced out of your current level within the management structure. Those news sources come from people who have meaningful stakes in their positions and who cannot afford to be caught out by inaccurate information. Even with those high-investment news sources, there's a risk that blind spots render those offering the news unable to see the garbage hidden within, which is why all news sources suffer from the garbage problem.

Because of the Internet, you may be connected, but you're not that kind of connected, and even if you were, you would still be dealing with this fundamental problem.

If you're going to have to live with problems regardless, why not aspire to have the kinds of problems other people cannot possibly afford to have? At the least, you could afford a considerably better and brighter class of garbage pickers to deal with your persistent problem of crap in the news.

As louche as you may be with your whisky, your cigars, and so forth, you are not nearly louche enough to employ vast armies of people just to support a profound level of loucheness that goes well past decadence toward being something that resembles an Ostensible Evil.

And if you are going to be an evil villain, or at least a pantomime version of one in the spirit of Nigel Farage, you could at least aspire to be more successful at it, if only for the purpose that it will be that much harder for anyone to lie to you via this sordid fake "news". :-)

Anonymous said...

Our major news outlets are owned by six corporations.