I don’t especially look for TV re-runs, most certainly when it’s a news program that I watch every night. It wasn’t just tonight. It was last night, last week, last month and prior to that. Tonight, I’d had enough. Five minutes into the “news,” I just turned it off.
For an event to qualify as news, doesn’t someone need to witness it and then tell others about it? Sounds like the same question as: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Perhaps it’s my imagination, but it seems that people who tell others what’s happening are avoiding forests.
For the sake of brevity, let’s call them “reporters,” although that may seem a stretch to some people. It often appears that they just make it up as they go along —faking it, so to speak— to the extent that we have a whole category called Fake News.
Fortunately, one of the other things I like to do is read non-fiction books which, really, “reporters” ought to try sometime to see if they can come up with original material which they probably would call a “scoop.” For example, from “Syrian Jihad” by Charles R. Lister, I learned that there were 1,500 separate Jihadi groups involved in the Syrian conflict,t which explains a lot about the random nature of the effort to get rid of Assad. It was published four years ago and I don’t know what has happened since.
Sources? Who Needs Stinkin’ Sources!
Lack of coverage of overseas events is explained, in part, by the “American University” web site which says, “Beginning the late 1980s, the number of full-time staff journalists posted in foreign cities to cover stories of global importance started to drop. Studies showed this trend accelerated in the 2000s.”
Recently, I caught a glimpse of an Internet headline describing the beginning of peace negotiations in Afghanistan, location of America’s longest war. Nothing of substance since then has come to my attention: Wouldn’t you think this a newsworthy event justifying regular reports telling us how things are going?
We have the Trump-Russia-Mueller nightly news merry-go-round which never changes. Foundation for this crap (I looked in vain for a nicer word for it) is the assumption that because Trump won and the Russians allegedly interfered, Trump must have collaborated with them.
If anyone in the news business read the Putin biography “The New Tsar” by Steven Lee Myers, they would have found out Putin held a serious grudge against then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her 2012 involvement in the Russian presidential election when she said that he had no soul. He blamed her for assisting anti-Putin groups organized to defeat him. His anger toward her involvement was confirmed by NBC.com.
But that wouldn’t agree with current events as described by current reportage requiring a whole new script to be rehearsed. Not likely to happen regardless of the facts on the ground.
And how about the high-toned moralizing about one nation interfering in another’s election process?
Could we have just discovered the source of voter ignorance?
