Maybe my next reading... [Archive] - SUBSIM Radio Room Forums

Skybird

02-09-08, 07:55 PM

... because it is not only the British journalism, but it has become an international epidemic that has degraded serious journalism. I also see it taking over to regular documentary films on nature, and wildlife, for example, where music and silly texts imply a certain predefined way to look at things, and make drama of pictures that originally where meant as documentary only, but now are used for pure and often fictional entertainment. i must say that especially many scientifiy films of the past five years made by the once very well-doing BBC suffer from this, but others as well. Good picture material - but very bad, ideologically influenced processing of the material. I do not watch BBC docus anymore, they are too manipulative for me. . It all tries to give the impression that there are no more questions to be asked. This obesession to feel well and easy and not needing to qwortk yourself for the answers has become a widespread disease. And it costs you the ability to thinik independently, and damages your intellectual creativity as well.

Quality of German TV and paper journalism also is in free fall since many years. And one must not even mentionAamerican media, especially TV. Usually it is said that the greater diversity of available info sources via the internet would compensate for the lacking quality of the single given source. since a while, I more and more start to doubt this. If too many of all these diverse sources are of bad quality - how could you get anything different from that than just a much greater heap of bad quality...?

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,2251390,00.html

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub475F682E3FC24868A8A5276D4FB916D7/Doc~E081D043D41EE48489D3EF6213FE9B0B0~ATpl~Ecommon ~Scontent.html

Yahoshua

02-10-08, 07:24 AM

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It's a sad state of affairs we have today.

As I am an avid learner of history, one phenomenon I have noticed is that the most dangerous form of societal collapse isn't by war but through over-indulgence of wealth and the subsequent apathy and self-centered selfishness during times of prosperity in peacetime.

This has become far more acute within the last 10 years as the "Internet Kids" (my generation) have become more brazen in their demands and expect more entitlements than what they've earned while lacking the skills or experience deserving of such entitlements. Worse still, is the alarming trend of intellectual laziness and apathy to the events occurring outside of their personal world.

They simply don't care about their education, nor do they feel that they need to bear the "burden" of personal responsibility. Their role-models have become celebrity actors and actresses, seeking to imitate them in almost every facet from fashion to political opinion. My generation has trained itself to constantly look for someone to hold their hand and tell them what to do. As a result, we have become intellectually lazy, apathetic, impatient and self-indulgent.

Our courts are more concerned with legislating jurisprudence from their bench than with anylitical and normative jurisprudence of law. This mindset has led to the obsession of putting notches into ones' belt rather than enacting the use of law in fair, unbiased, and uniform rulings. How many laws are enough for this nation? How many more until we can say "okay, we don't need to enact any more laws for the time-being."

We have so many laws on the books that we are unable to enforce them all! In a legal world where frivilous litigants can sue for any reason (ala. the hot cofee girl) we still have no remedy that would institute punishment against those who abuse the system. How much longer will we allow this to continue? How many more lives must be ruined through our courts by prosecutors and judges who are immune to lawsuits even if they knowingly put an innocent defendant in prison? The American legal system is no longer about truth or justice but of who can afford the best actor for their case.

Likewise our politicians are untrustworthy as ever, yet we fully expect them to lead our nation in the best interests of the people? We have allowed our politicians to become more infatuated with creating legislation to make it look as if they are doing something important while their politicking has hindered our nation more than ever before. The politicking has come to the point of being downright dangerous, going as far as holding up vital war funds to the point that reconstruction in Iraq slowed to a stop and forced the military to drastically cut back on military patrols. This worried the Iraqis that the growing restabilization of Iraq would plunge the nation into civil war and that the insurgency would return in force again.

These are the people we expect to keep the nation safe and running? My god, if this is the best we have to offer then we're in a nearly irreversible state of affairs that would take decades to unravel. Yet I see little enthusiasm from my generation for reforming the political machinery or fixing the shortcomings of our judicial and legislative processes.

Along with this whole sorry mess is our media network. There is not a single news organisation within the U.S. that has a Foreign Correspondence Bureau. Almost all of our news from foreign nations come from the local national papers. I can already get more accurate information of european politics from Der Spiegel or (and I apologize for putting this name next to Der Spiegel) the BBC than I can from CNN or ABC. That is a sad state of affairs where anchors of integrity and experience such as Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, and Wolf Blitzer are virtually non-existent.

What do we have now? This sentimental bullsh*t about being "fair and impartial" in news broadcasts and reports. Since when was anyone ever "fair and impartial" at the voting booth or on a political issue? It isn't like the news anchors don't vote like everyone else. I get better and more informative news in an hour of internet surfing than I do in the same timespan of watching MSNBC or Fox news.

In times past, a single murder was a horrendous tragedy; today it's something we find on page 22, in that small 8-line paragraph in the bottom corner. Worse still is the constant "exposure" of race-crimes involving white-on-black, but if a black-on-white crime is committed it's not newsworthy. I don't have to ask what went wrong, I already know what the problem is, but doesn't anyone else see it either? A black man and an asian can pass eachother on the street and scream every racial slur at eachother known to man (hey, maybe invent a few more while they're at it), but it's called "culture clashes" and not racism. But if a white man calls a black man "******" or an asian a "yellow monkey," that person just became one of the most evil people on the face of the earth and is labeled a "racist" and this is considered newsworthy.

Our networks have done a greater disservice to our nation than the flaws of our political and judicial system combined. People who know nothing of what's going on in our judicial and political systems will be incapable of reacting in time to avert disaster.

It's a grand farce that has left me bitter and disillusioned and I don't see things getting any better for us down the road.

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