REDHORSE - Speaking of newspapers and profits and
shorting staff, at the height of the war on Iraq, CBS
news paid its entire Baghdad bureau a total of $7
million/year.  CBS News paid its CEO, Moonvest (sp?)
$40 million/year.

The rationale behind this - I have no idea, but I’d
love to ask CBS News to give me one.

It’s telling that failure of many newspapers was not that they weren’t profitable, but that they weren’t profitable enough. Likewise, the cutting of reporting staff to add to the investors bottom line.

    “Synthetic novelty” is a close description of what many think of as the “great non-event”. Adult action/opinion is promised but childlike naivete and entertainment is delivered. In short, we’re diddled.
I doubt I’m the only one here that feels rage when confronted with obvious talking head propagandist
crap. Continued low level “rage” is an intended consequence of the “diddle”. It causes the body and mind stress and harm.

    Ever put a stopwatch to your local news? Take out the teasers, commercials and car carnage, how much is there?

    What you can’t say owns you. Keep it alive!! I know we all wander a little, but sometimes, someone here, hits it clean out of the park.

I’m telling this not because I want to call attention to my personal experiences.  I’m telling it because it might be encouraging to others.
  During the McCarthy era, as a part-time teacher I was asked to sign the despised “loyalty” oath. I needed the money but ... it was a part-time job that augmented my hustand’s salary.  We decided we would get along somehow without it, and with much anxiety for my future, I refused to sign and resigned. Immediately I found out that two other part-timers had done the same. Furthermore, five full-timers thanked me in private conversatioins saying they wished they could do the same but it would mean their family’s livelihood and the kids had to eat and have a place to live. They would be risking tenure and pensions also.
  I understand that fully and do not blame them. At the same time, I was glad I did what little I could.
As it turned out, the loyalty oath thing died a natural death—but not without much pain from a few who fought against it more vigorously than I.
Other factors entered in, as always happens. People experience courage while acting in cooperation with others. Even when they feel alone, it turns out that they are not alone after all.

What, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan and its expansion into Pakistan in Obama’s wars of necessity is making us less safe? I thought that could only happen under Bush? Are you sure? I mean, it isn’t like anyone has tried to blow up anything in the US since he became President now, has there. Oh, right, I forgot about that Pakistani Taliban guy who has ties to Al Queda, but then don’t they all?

Try Amusing Ourselves to Death by Ted Postman or The Trivializing of America. Along with their dummied down education they have gotten dummied down TV. When people watch a sporting event, not because of the event but rather the commercials, then rational people realize that they are no longer living in a country where smart people rules!

bogi66:  You hit it exactly!  They do what they are paid to do.  That’s the heart of many, maybe most, of our problems.
  But—there is nothing written that says we have to do what we are paid to do, that we have to sell ourselves to get money. That there are no other choices. In some circles that’s called prostitution, and it is generally not thought of as a healthy or moral occupation.
  But when nobody resists, it’s hard to begin resisting. Most prostitutes think there is nothing else they can do, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise.
  That’s exactly where we’re at.  Nobody wants to be first to put themselves and their families at risk by changing, by refusing to sell out. Yet at the same time we hate ourselves for selling out.
  Therefore we have to find a way to unite and do it by supporting each other.
  But ... part of our selling out means that, as we know no one who has NOT sold out, we can’t trust each other to cooperate, hold to a more moral position, help each other if we are under attack, and most of all—believe in the possibility of what in some places of the world is called “right living.”  (They just gave out a number of awards in Germany for “right-living” according to Amy G. last week.) 
  Holy Moly!  You mean there are actually people who are living right?  How come I never heard of them before?  Why didn’t I hear?  Who’s responsible for that?

Great comments. Thanks!!

Read English language papers from other countries, allowing for national biases. Read in original languages where possible.
  Solicit news from places that are usually ignored in “western” publications. Include some background to stories from more obscure and long-neglected places (Africa, rural India, Central Asia, South America, Siberia etc.)
  Be aware of and point out similarities and differences in points of view, economic statuses.
  A mammoth but much needed undertaking too big to talk much about without danger of over-generalizing. 
  Routinely we are ignoring English-speakers abroad who have knowledge of other languages and are capable of relaying news from where they live if there was a place to relay it to, where it would be published or put up online.  Encourage them to put it online themselves under a central heading like “Ex-Pat-Speak—News and Views of Those Who Have Escaped from the American Dream and found ....?”

gerard - my comment was in answer to your post.  (I’m
really fuzzy-brained at 8 in the morning,sorry.)

I happen to live in a So-Cal scenic seaside refuge
(from intelligent life) so am ‘exposed’ to the same
chirpy spam-heads (rather than delivering the news,
they interfere with it) as you.

However, I can’t leave out the big spam-heads, the
ones who have made it off the local stations and into
big-time, in depth, ‘intelligent’ spam-head
broadcasting.  One in particular comes to mind. She
gets ‘off’ on our local car chases.  She positively
drools her delivery as she monitors mile-by-mile the
gripping contest between fugitive and the 80 cop cars
following behind. I really shouldn’t say this, but I
fully expect her to have an organism right on camera
someday - especially if the chase ends in tragedy.

I use Google’s news aggregator, which collects news and opinions from a variety of sources.  To judge between the sources, however, one must apply one’s reason and intuition, both of which will be strongly colored by one’s beliefs about the world—a characteristic of the sources as well.  This situation leads to certain kinds of blindness, but on the other hand one can’t make sense of the world at all without some kind of ideological framework, a predicament of being stuck in a paradox (‘Catch-22’).

However, even if we resign ourselves to being slaves of our affections and intuitions we might still like to differentiate between those observers and reporters who are veracious and others who, shall we say, are less so.  At this point it isn’t obvious how to do this, especially for those phenomena which we can’t check by our own observation.  I suspect that Judith Miller is a liar and Amy Goodman tells the truth, but it’s hard to prove except after long experience, which may be too late for some pressing question.  Many seemingly intelligent people believed in Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and relations with al-Qaeda even though none existed; they believed long enough to let Bush start his war, anyway.

“I wonder if any of you have any ideas or suggestions for creating
more satisfactory, more trustworthy and effective media.” 

No!  That was a joke question, right?

Okay, a serious question, yeah?  Okay… uh….googlenews?  Stop listening
and watching all other news programs.  Discuss what is happening as per
reported by googlenews with friends and foes on blogs such as TD?

Ah, the news media, and Daniel Boorstin. My fav since The Discovers
and The Creators, indeed was a predecessor of Baudrillaud falling
well within the postmodernism of the early 60s.  The idea and actual
coining the term pseudo event he argued that the wholly symbolic
revolution in journalism and other forms of communication had
disconnected the idea of personality and celebrity from greatness,
and that this was a rupture where the famous fell headlong into the
decay of paltry and measly notoriety.  I dare say that events of recent
account, i.e., the Glenn Beck Washington Mall fiasco, are perfect
examples of phony public affairs that descend into putrification. 

Another great thinker in recent human history, who also took up the
challenges of postmodernism and hyperreality, Umberto Eco also made
a lively comment, though much more succinct, on the state of free
press in 1997 On the Press, a short essay in his Five Moral Pieces (and
printed in bookform in 2002), directing his comments at the Italian
news machines, in the form of a letter to the Italian government’s
senators is completely applicable today in America.  His text, Travels in
Hyperreality is a much longer look at the insanity of modernity and
artificial events, and I might throw in my own perspective of insanity of
contrivances of spectacle-postmodernity as well.  What Boorstin and
Eco and now Sirota speak about is downright fightening given the
moldable minds that exist in society.

Were there any writers today who would be so intrepid.  Eco’s
audacious complaint is still bitingly relevant of the news media that is
in the world today.  On ethical principles and in not so congenial words,
although in his command of the language he made it seemingly affable,
he criticized that the news media has a moral responsibility to inform
rather than to titillate with gossip and advertising. The idea of morality
when it comes to the news media is not in their vocabulary.  I cannot
think of one journalist who is worthy to listen to. 

Not quite strong enough words for today’s pseudo news and pseudo
events that pseudo news reports and editorials incessantly 24/7 numbs
even the most discriminating viewers.

Now that everyone has performed the ancient and hallowed Denouncing-the-Media ritual, I wonder if any of you have any ideas or suggestions for creating more satisfactory, more trustworthy and effective media.  In this age when practically everybody has the world at their keyboard.

heelstriker’s comment below made me reflect on our local “newscasters” here in So-Cal’s scenic seaside refuge from intelligent life.

The casters are so chummy, smoothe-faced and happy to be alive that the trap of faux-neighborliness they set is almost irresistable.  Obviously, they do not care what they are saying, but they lean closely into every local event with a skillful pretense of enthusiasm and just enough variation in tone of voice to keep listeners from falling into a daze. 
. If the entire coastline fell into the sea they would intimate blandly that it was, although as yet unconfirmed, rumored to be at least indirectly the fault of “the homeless” or “illegal immigration” and move on quickly to the next meeting of the committee for the new library or an announcement about this year’s poet laureate or what agencies are fighting over the few remaining pieces of undeveloped real estate.
  Even when it rains here, it is sunny, and the rest of the world does not exist except as a foil for contrasting our blessed artificial isolation from the outside, where everything seems to be going wrong for a variety of reasons too difficult to explain. 
  Distant horrors like war and unemployment and foreclosures have no personal relevance to the majority of listeners, and therefore can be “delivered” with complacency and in-jokes about the news staff’s children and pets. 
  Even stormy weather is reported with artful animated illustrations by a jolly carnival barker selling cotton candy to the kiddies. Nothing can go wrong here, absolutely nothing.  It is forbidden.
  To maintain a reasonable balance I have to work hard to keep from falling off the high end of euphoric know-nothingness.

Stay up late one night and watch the networks’ overnight news.  They can’t even deliver hard news when no one is watching.

Here’s another fun project.  Close your eyes and listen to your local news show.  A lot of it won’t even make sense, and I’ll be damned if they don’t sound like they’re having a lot of fun.

Sirota has written here most everything I would say about the tragi-comedy that so held the attention of the media for the last week or so. Personally, I put down or clicked out of any article pertaining to the whole deal.. and I’m thinking that lots more people did likewise than the media attention to the circus implies..

I want also to say that the comment equating Obama to a synthetic event.. which may have angered me about a year ago.. now finds me unable to rise to the task of defending him.

What does all this imply? I’m not entirely sure!

Adios.

Execute the Christians and the Muslims, burn their sacred books, and then the world will know peace.

CNN, MSNBC, Fox, ABC, CBS, et al. each have to compete with Jersey Shore and
American Idol for ratings.  And, whether we like it or not, these corporate
subsidiaries are in the entertainment business.  How else will they divert
enough eyes away from WWE and the annual Hooters swimsuit competition than
to breathlessly cover manufactured scandals and false outrages?

Most Americans simply don’t *want* to think in their free time.  They - and we
all know this from first-hand experience - would rather recline in their easy-
chair, pour themselves a tall glass of Coke, munch on a few Pringles, enjoy their
air-conditioned abode, and surf their 200+ channels.  It’s relaxing, it’s easy,
and it’s mindless.  It’s an escape from the pressures and struggles of a dying
empire (e.g., unemployment, poverty, lack of adequate health insurance,
subservience to an unforgiving corporate overseer, crime, etc.).

Add to this a virulent nationalism and you have a toxic mix.

Besides, most people feel utterly helpless in the face of a collapsing global
economy, endless war, and the wholesale auctioning of our government to
corporate interests.  Resistance is futile, or so it seems.  So why bother?

I certainly don’t defend this apathy and almost complete disinterest in fact, but
it is understandable.  We, at least those 90% of us in the underclass, have been
treated like dogs for the past 40 years or so.  Beaten into submission by
oligarchs, militarists, and profiteers.  Our “way of life” [that post-WWII artificial
prosperity] is, indeed, slipping away, and we’re not happy about it.

So give us outrage.  Give us spectacle.  We’re mad as hell.  But powerless. 
Pastor Jones on CNN.  Jackie Evancho on America’s Got Talent.  The Weather
Channel before bed.  Sleep.  Work.  Repeat.

Who has time for roving Afghan death squads and severed finger trophies? 
Besides, Virginia Tech plays tomorrow and the ‘Skins play Sunday.  How about
that Albert Haynesworth?  And Jim Zorn?!  What a scrub!

“Precious time is slipping away,
It doesn’t matter to what God you pray
Precious time is still slipping away.”
      VAN MORRISON

Picking up on felicity’s comment, I often think the political elite desires to present all problems as unsolvable problems (a national health service, the end of torture and wars without end) so that in the general zeal to mold an even more obedient consumer robot, it all gets presented as simply a clash of personalities, where policies take a back seat to manufactured celebrity.
Matt Taibbi pointed this out early, in his observations of ex-Governor Palin. It is really all about aligning with a brand, no matter how stupid or ridiculous.
This phenomena cuts across the entire political spectrum. From Obama apologists to Tea Party hacks who despise taxes yet still embrace the idea of the American military hegemony. The Year Of The Dingbat is in full swing these days.
Meanwhile, wasting precious time has become a multi-billion dollar industry. The distraction from television and Internet (yes, including this bloody post) has become so pervasive that the zippy-ah-d-dew-dah of Twitter has become the crummy politicians best friend tool. What a rotten development!

Many people who comment here seem to regard the writers of articles appearing on this site as no more than lackeys of the corrupt elite-owned media/government/corporation dominion. I don’t doubt that they are biased by the system, but I don’t think they are beyond broader influences.
  Most of them have come “up” from the more ignorant sectors of American society and have the intelligence and the access that could help make significant changes in media in general. They all had significant education regarding the importance of freedom of speech, the dangers of news turned into propaganda, the fact that social questions, rather than being answered, are compounded by ideological bias.
  Their negligence is no greater than our own. Therefore, I do not write them off as hopeless.  I do not think they are merely “in it for the money”. If I thought so, I wouldn’t bother to pay attention to them or comment on what they write.

It is a fact that when people are faced with problems
they can do nothing about, cannot solve they
concentrate their mind and effort on problems they
can do something about and can solve.

(Studies have turned up the interesting phenomenon
that people spend far less time determining what
house to buy (because knowing all the ins and outs is
virtually impossible) while they’ll shop-til-they-
drop determining what microwave oven to buy (because
they can find out which has the best press.)

Until human behavior changes - probably impossible -
we will continue to solve the solvable while we
ignore the unsolvable. 

So we’re fed fantasy, special-effects ridden
Hollywood is handling that genre, where there is
nothing TO solve while television’s so-called
journalism is handling the gossip, sensationalism and
manufactured controversy which are mere diversions
from ugly reality.

Saw a great documentary on LaFAYETTE last week. When I thought of the “french fry” hate spin perped by the Cheney administration I almost wept. The Republithug lie machine, again and again, cheapens discourse and hacks at the bonds connecting Americans to their living history. Without the French there would have been no America, and of course, that beloved Lady holding the Torch of Liberty, is French. Never mind Jean LaFitte, or those who came down the Mississippi after the fight on the Plains of Abraham. Grrrrrrrrrr.

    It is obvious to me, that outside the danger presented by their paranoid greed, the inhabitants of Washington, at least for the present, are no longer relevant to the American Destiny. Indeed, Mr. Sirota said what we have all known for a great while. It’s an airball. My struggle and confusion is in trying to understand what nefarious forces bind us to the desire that Murdoch/Fox/Beck and the like should “see the light” and be anything other than what they are—airballs. They’re not something else. Some infectious diseased factor constellated in the insanity of their psychological being leaves us disoriented, enraged and somehow robs us of power. As adults, expecting more (reporting based on human reality) and receiving less is the great passive/aggressive non-event that keeps us powerless and twisting in emotional space. Those who perp it know what they’re doing and that makes it daemonic. Does the word “daemonic” not apply to Boehner?

    We must reclaim our own separate identity and reality as Americans and reconnect with our living history as a people in both its light and dark aspects. We need a NEW DIALOGUE ENTIRELY. HELP!! There is no salvation in Washington nor in the lie machine they’ve manufactured. Their intentional creation of national social disintegration and open looting of the American economy is just that, no greater purpose than avaricious greed will be revealed.

    The horror of a compromised press and national communication pales beside the twisted values, moral damage and skewed reality the machine is now imprinting on the minds of American youth. It’s time to unplug and get very very vocal and selective. No more garbage in—only out. Find community.

    Well—bow wow wow-we all do what we can. Still, it’s time to stop beating the dead horse in Washington—it’s dead. A new future is demanding birth, a hard rain is falling, and we’re all soaked to the bone.

So Boorstin seems to have been a predecessor of Baudrillard, a postmodernist avant la lettre.  That’s kind of interesting.

I don’t know about this ‘authentic’ business, though.  Publicly burning a Koran is symbolic speech, but it seems authentic—sincere—enough to me, whereas the sort of thing mid-century pundits seemed to like, like New York Times editorials then and now, the ‘real news and serious discourse’ we’re supposedly missing, seem far more fabricated and unreal, and inflict on us as well visions of stuffed shirts in gray flannel suits.

David Sirota and other journalists like him are in a position where they might get together and work to get the crazed operatives of big media to change their ways and become conscientious dispensers of accurate news and information to a public desperately in need of basic political education.
  What I want to know is what did Sirota and his associates do—or what are they doing—in this regard? 
  It seems amiss to me that he and others like him prefer to blame the impersonal, public “us” and “we” as “mesmerized” rather than to address the moral conscience of the mesmerizers.
  It is this latter which is desperately needed.

I propose a news item which sounds synthetic but is
frighteningly real. The blurb:

“American way of life threatened as Australian
immigrant widens control over his adopted country
through national mind control.

“Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, built around Fox
News, is major rallying point for corporate-
friendly, radical-rightwing political candidates
who want even lower taxes and more loopholes for
the mega-rich..

Fox trashings of health care reform, unemployment
insurance, Social Security and most other
government programs have successfully turned
millions of people away from their own needs.

Etc. Easily documented.

As an American abroad, it is often difficult to define, when asked, the “American Culture”. All too often, in minds abroad, Hollywood is the reflection of our culture—which is a great shame, given both the trash and flash it is capable of producing. And also, some damn fine films.

But one characteristic (of an evolved culture) that seems missing is reasoned debate or discourse amongst its citizens. This is the sort of exchange some of us learned in high-school if we belonged to a Debating Society. It consists of the sort of dialog that avoided ad hominens, slurs of any kind and defamation. Whatever happened to those “good ole days”?

They seem,  methinks,  to have been lost in America’s fixation on “winning”, one of the attributes of a highly competitive society. But by what means does demeaning someone consist of reasoned-debate? How does defamation contribute to the argumentation so foundational of logical debate?

In a country where speech is one of our basic freedoms, then any kind of expression seems permissible. Which is tantamount to a perversion of the freedom of speech – and will remain so until defamation laws are better upheld (or established, whichever comes first).

We do not have a right to say anything about everybody at all times. Calling someone a Effing Jerk is … uh, name-calling. It is not the sort of reasoned argument necessary to substantiate the fact that someone is a stupid or incompetent or full of baloney. Only well-articulated adversarial debate with quality content can achieve that higher-level of knowledge.

But bad-mouthing IS cathartic. Meaning we employ ad hominems because they make us feel better, despite the fact that – in any given exchange of opinion – they carry no significance whatsoever. They are devoid of any factuality, thus irrelevant and therefore pollution of speech. But what on-line forum in the blogosphere escapes such pejorative usage? Not many, unless severely monitored – and that depends upon the whimsy of the forum’s founder.

So, it happens left and right, night and day – which seems to present a great hindrance to reasoned debate; i.e., the kind that helps us arrive at well-thought opinions of sometimes highly complex matters.

If such is indeed the state of reasoned debate today in America, then we’ve become a backward nation—and just as hackneyed as the expressions/expletives employed.

I think FRTothus has probably encountered this. Just questioning the validity of what Karlheinz Stockhausen called “the greatest work of art there has ever been” i.e.; the Nine One One teleprompter for war without end, provokes savage response for even daring to questioning the validity of that “sacred” event. That is a virtual football that the ownership class enablers will run with forever. Emotional buttons that they will never stop pushing.
There is a valid point made when Hammond Eggs points out that Barack Obama is a pseudo event. An event which most of the folks at the Huffington Post and Truthdig refuse to acknowledge for its hollow banality. Witness Michael Moore trying to absolve himself for being an Obama shill, hoping to regain some of his long gone catholic-social-justice street credentials.
Christine O’Donnell’s ascendancy to the limelight, reveals that in terms of the calendar, this is The Year Of The Dingbat. Ms. O’Donnell who is a fierce advocate of “tough love”, who also believes that food stamps promote increased drug use and that “God is watching you from above” like some heavenly peeping tom, who always knows what you’ve been doing,now seeks to destroy big bad government, by working diligently to become a part of it.
Funny how the tea angry can not notice this contradiction, but why should they? The Tea Party too is a pseudo event.

Here is another perspective from Mother Jones that also relates to Hedges book ‘American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.’

O’Donnell represents a joining together of the two forces, evident in Beck’s religious revival at the Lincoln Memorial.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/09/christine-odonnell-christian-right-connections

And what about the mother of all pseudo-events, the
inside job of the US-orchestrated 9/11 False-flag
operation, David?  Don’t have the balls to take that
one on, do you?  Then consider yourself part of that
“we” you whine about who “are too mesmerized by the
synthetic novelty”, the “we” who “don’t think to ask
uncomfortable questions nor…strive for [an]
enlightened perspective. We instead tell ourselves
that by joining the cartoonish pseudo-events, we will
magically defuse pressing crises—even as our
participation in those pseudo-events allows those
crises to fester.”

What a hypocrite.

Chris Hedges last book, ‘Empire of Illusion’ is about just this phenomena. We behave like children and allow ourselves to be treated like children.

The entire Tea Party is created and controlled by the media (read corporate money).  The diversion of our attention to spectacle is to keep us uninformed and unengaged. This way the status quo functions without interruption.  (It is hard to chant ‘America is number one!’ if soldiers are wearing trophy body parts from civilian murders.)

Just think, ‘O’Donnell should be unelectable’ with a dirty past and ‘nutty’ ideas, but she is also Fox News fodder which is the Tea Party station of choice.  Fox news has been supporting her campaign. For some reason big money wants her to win.

Is it because she will assist in the ‘shock’ of disaster capitalism for this country while she distracts the ‘mall walkers’ with thoughts of abstinence and masturbation?

Barack Obama as president of the United States is today’s true pseudo event.