On the Occupy Wall Street site, at www.occupywallst.org, they say,
"The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."
What are you talking about? What greed? What corruption? This is the most vacant, most intellectually sloppy protest I've ever seen. With all the problems we face as a nation, to camp out in America's cities against "greed and corruption" is ignorant and absurd.
America is among the least corrupt countries in the world. According to Transparency.org America is less corrupt than every other member of the UN Security Council except the UK (ranked as the 20th least corrupt country beating the US at 22nd).
And as for the "greed" of the 1% -- are you really protesting against greed? Seriously? What's next, sloth? Followed by lust, gluttony, avarice, vanity, and pride? You might as well put them on the list. In fact, I'd go after pride or vanity first. I've always found it more odious than greed...but that's just me.
I heard older members of OWS on the radio comparing their protest to the civil rights movement. I'm too young to claim a piece of that storied struggle but to compare "greed and corruption" to racism and sexism is insulting to the civil rights movement. I don't think greedy people lynched anyone. I don't think the "corrupt 1%" held other humans in bondage, beat them with whips, stole their babies, or...you get the idea.
I know over 9% of Americans are out of work. And I know many of them have been out of work for a very long time. It's incredibly frustrating and difficult. I got laid-off in July 2009. Thankfully I was given the chance to work for myself and I'm staying afloat that way. But please, people, what exactly is your point? What do you want to change? Who do you want to put in charge? What is your idea?
The colonists who sparked the American Revolution had a clear idea: leave the crown, start our own country with new rules. The seceding South knew what they wanted. MLK and the civil rights protesters knew where they wanted to take the country. What do you want? Or is it just sloth and gluttony run rampant in the absence of work and purpose?
Friday, October 14, 2011
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
We Get the Media We Deserve
Yesterday I heard a news radio guest blame the media for something. I think it was the way Amanda Knox's friends and family were able to bend it towards their will. It doesn't matter. The point is this: we get the media we deserve, the media we demand, and the media we want.
It's always been this way. But now with citizen journalists (like, say, me writing this) anyone with an internet connection and a computer can publish anything with impunity (the button above to put this on the web is labeled "PUBLISH"). No longer must you amass the wealth to build or buy printing presses and distribution channels. Citizen journalists don't see their keyboards as an access point to a sacred public trust they way Editors and Journalists (cap "E", cap "J") did in the past. Remember how the White House press corp during FDR went to pains to help him hide his wheelchair-bound presidency? They believed the public good would be ill-served by promoting his handicap. Publishing photos and telling stories of his infirmity would violate the sacred trust of serving the public good.
Yet even way back then when everything in America was great (smell the sarcasm?) newspapers gave people what they wanted. The stories of Capone were irresistible to read and therefore to print. Never-mind the bloodshed, tell us more! People wanted it. The media delivered. But pre-internet, pre-cable news, pre-24/7-always-on-media-era there existed a nobles oblige culture among Editors and Journalists that tempered stories (now called content) to serve, as much as possible without hurting profits, the public good.
The democratization of media through the web has bypassed that tempering culture, crushed it under billions of free form websites. We should've seen this coming when Springsteen sang "57 channels and nothing on". Cable lowered the news media standards. With the cable laid and the infrastructure built the operators went searching for stories...I mean content. Among the takers? Cable news shows that could now reach a ready-made audience without assembling a network of local stations, stations who themselves had had to invest in distribution infrastructure and programming. The web and cable media are all competing for one thing: your eyeballs. And print media needs to compete with them too for subscription and ad dollars. So print has to lower its standards too (see: USAToday--aka McPaper; The Week--cliffs notes of everyone else; and the decimation of nearly every other print brand unwilling to drop their standards). Nobles oblige? Standards? Fact-checking? The public good? A sacred public trust? Huh???
We have the media we deserve. So stop blaming them -- by which I mean us -- for over-reporting Chris Christie, salacious stories from Hollywood, or ruining the occasional innocent reputation. Don't like it? Change the channel.
It's always been this way. But now with citizen journalists (like, say, me writing this) anyone with an internet connection and a computer can publish anything with impunity (the button above to put this on the web is labeled "PUBLISH"). No longer must you amass the wealth to build or buy printing presses and distribution channels. Citizen journalists don't see their keyboards as an access point to a sacred public trust they way Editors and Journalists (cap "E", cap "J") did in the past. Remember how the White House press corp during FDR went to pains to help him hide his wheelchair-bound presidency? They believed the public good would be ill-served by promoting his handicap. Publishing photos and telling stories of his infirmity would violate the sacred trust of serving the public good.
Yet even way back then when everything in America was great (smell the sarcasm?) newspapers gave people what they wanted. The stories of Capone were irresistible to read and therefore to print. Never-mind the bloodshed, tell us more! People wanted it. The media delivered. But pre-internet, pre-cable news, pre-24/7-always-on-media-era there existed a nobles oblige culture among Editors and Journalists that tempered stories (now called content) to serve, as much as possible without hurting profits, the public good.
The democratization of media through the web has bypassed that tempering culture, crushed it under billions of free form websites. We should've seen this coming when Springsteen sang "57 channels and nothing on". Cable lowered the news media standards. With the cable laid and the infrastructure built the operators went searching for stories...I mean content. Among the takers? Cable news shows that could now reach a ready-made audience without assembling a network of local stations, stations who themselves had had to invest in distribution infrastructure and programming. The web and cable media are all competing for one thing: your eyeballs. And print media needs to compete with them too for subscription and ad dollars. So print has to lower its standards too (see: USAToday--aka McPaper; The Week--cliffs notes of everyone else; and the decimation of nearly every other print brand unwilling to drop their standards). Nobles oblige? Standards? Fact-checking? The public good? A sacred public trust? Huh???
We have the media we deserve. So stop blaming them -- by which I mean us -- for over-reporting Chris Christie, salacious stories from Hollywood, or ruining the occasional innocent reputation. Don't like it? Change the channel.
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