Indicators

The LATimes did at least a fairly decent job today on covering the World Bank issue. Well, aside fromt the byline found in the paper, at least.

But a KFI host yesterday really bashed in the Times for its coverage of the missing Coalition soldiers (a haughty report on page six really doesn't do justice). The Times proved this host's point today with its follow-up story. Maybe if newspapers listened to the airwaves, they'd stop fumbling!

Oh, and a final thing...y'know how pictures are worth a thousand words? And how words in a newspaper these days are almost worthless? Well, they add up. Those who have a hard copy of today's Times with them will have a blatantly obvious example staring up at them on the top flap of the front page: Iraqis "cheering" on a destroyed carrier in which Danish troops were attacked.

And you wonder why most LATimes readers are against the war....

Journalistic Foci

Okay, so it's been a while. But I haven't changed, and neither has the LA Times, so the posts'll be along the same lines even now. For example, we got a lower-right Front Page story "The Iraq war, spliced for a YouTube world." OK, so this article's not as bad as most, and any anti-war sentiments are implied, and it takes some thinking to get there, actually. But the real kicker paragraph comes near the end:

"When a bombing happens in another city, it's a big deal," he said. "When it happens here, people [in the rest of the world] are used to it. The think, 'OK, so another 100 people died.'"

I bet most of you don't realize what kind of gold has come with this quote. The key here is the media reporting the war. Most headlines are ignorant of all else save one thing - how many died. What was the cause, who committed the injustice, and were any of our troops involved in bringing the perpetrators to justice at the time?

Who knows, and who cares, because to the Mainstream, Drive-By Media, all that matters is the dead. And if all that's reported in the media is who died, OF COURSE people throughout the world are only going to think "oh, more have died!"

But the saddest part is, this is no journalistic agenda. This is the essense of journalism itself. If it bleeds, it ledes, but only because, as the journalistic mentality goes, people close to the individual need to know. That is why people, en masse, are against the Iraq War - their attention spans are so short, all they have time to know is who died, and ergo to them that's all that happens. Because people are too busy to read about the merits of our troops' good an valiant actions, they come away with a false impression of the war that hurts reality.

And young, budding journalists are taught from day one that the very first thing they should mention, should it happen, are deaths from an incident. I should know. I was in that introductory class.

Welcome to your special World of Journalism.

Penraker Will Love...

Well, normally I'm not one for the old books. And yet I find, quite oddly, that I hate Socrates and Plato with a passion, yet I find Aristotle quite acceptable. That said, I had been reading the latter's "Nicomachean Ethics" - which my philosophy professor told the class to buy even though we never read it, so I held on to it for summer reading - and I found a passage that would greatly inspire the author of the blog penraker.com:

"For the many naturally obey fear, not shame; they avoid what is base because of the penalties, not because it is disgraceful. For since they live by thier feelings, they pursue their proper pleasures and the sources of them, and avoid the opposed pains, and have not even a notion of what is fine and [hence] truly pleasant, since they have had no taste of it."
- (Aristotle, X9-1179b)

i.e., Says I, this means in today's society that people generally pursue the good feeling of orgasms while simultaneously avoiding pregnancy - the whole point of sex, not the other way around. People today are destroying the future generations in favor of "feeling good" now, because of the pleasant feeling following the plateau stage of intercourse. This, of course, boils down to the ethical/moral dilemma of the lack of care for our children, which is of course a major focusing point of penraker's blog.