Saturday, January 12, 2008

Repeat As Often As Needed: They Aren’t Journalists, They’re Opinionists. Posted by olvlzl

It’s been fun, of a sort, watching the media fall all over themselves as they try to explain or cover up or drool in bewildered astonishment at their inability to divine that Hillary Clinton would win the primary in New Hampshire. It’s fun mixed with the anger of the same people who dismissed the polling in Florida and Ohio in order to make questioning the legitimacy of the Bush junta indecent. In a corrupt system any tool of public deception is turned on or off depending on what the predetermined effect requires. And none of these tools is more used than opinion polling, the fraud which supposedly uses the opinion of the public as its raw material. You would think from the frenzy of “abadabadabadabadaba” flowing from the TV that they are afraid the jig is finally up, that the people have seen the wires holding up the levitated elephant. If only.

In the spirit of ditching frauds, it’s time for us all to stop calling the large majority of our media “journalists”. That word should never be applied to Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, anyone on the cabloids or those who phone in “editorials, analysis, opinion, a-says-b-says pieces, etc.” They aren’t dealing in supported facts, their work doesn’t support the truth. They are opinionists, that’s the polite way of putting it. I know that calling them something else is closer to the truth, but we need something they can say on TV. Not that they will. As one person said to me, "What about all those polls over the past year that said Clinton had it sewn up? What happened to that "fact"?"

And then there is this succinct condensation of the truth behind all the business reporting you are going to be hearing as we go into the coming depression:

THE SUBHEAD on your front-page story on Thursday, "Big slowdown in spending could bring recession," says it all. Rough economic weather lies ahead, and it's all the consumer's fault. more stories like this

Americans have been chastised for decades for not saving enough and for our increasing dependence on debt. But now, a family that cuts consumption to pay down debt endangers the economy. Either way, the consumer is to blame.

Of course consumers should live within their means. But they should also take a peek behind the curtain of our consumption-addicted economy.

What if they found profiteering insurance and pharmaceutical corporations, unethical mortgage lenders seeking taxpayer bail-outs, and an astonishing concentration of wealth and power among the elite? They might demand a new set of rules and vote out the officials who wrote the old ones.

Scary business. Better to close the curtain and blame the consumer.

NEIL CLARK Arlington