It's What You Don't See...
Stef and I are both students at EIU and we were lucky enough to be able to take the same class together last semester (she got a better grade than I). The class was a senior seminar about journalism. Through our course work we learned about news reels called March of Time that brought the news of the Dust Bowl, which the mass media ignored, to the urban areas in the movie houses.
The mainstream media of the 1930s wanted to show happy times and try to make people either forget there was a Depression going on or to make them believe it wasn't as bad as people thought it was. The March of Times helped tell the truth and wasn't afraid. The newsreels helped change people's perception of what was really happening in our country at the time.
Likewise on Thursday and Friday of this last week, the mainstream media trotted out economists and ran stories highlighting that the recession was either over or in full recovery. Here's another attempt by our media to pull the wool over our eyes. Our country's GDP dropped 1% instead of 1.5% and the way the media tells it, you would think everything is better now. If it weren't for that pesky high unemployment, record setting deficits and debt, and oncoming inflation, we'd be sitting pretty, right?
As I've stated before, we have an opportunity to talk to people from all over the world and our country almost on a daily basis. The other evening, we were talking to a trucker who hauls all over the country from California to Texas to West Virginia and elsewhere. Yet again, politics or the economy came up in our conversation - no surprise there! Here's a synopsis of what he told us:
This country and people are in real trouble. He's been to several cities where he has seen tent cities and poverty like never before. He's seen people sitting on the side of the road selling their belongings to raise money to survive or to stay in their homes.
The look on his face and in his eyes showed us that what he had seen was probably worse than anything he had seen for quite a long time - and he was an older gentleman so he's probably seen plenty.
My point is that all of this is going on across the country but yet it doesn't get reported, even by Fox News. If ignorance is bliss, then the United States must be a very happy place. To me, the media's lack of coverage of what it is really like around the US is a failure of journalism. Of course if they do cover it, it will be slanted that George W started it all, and Obama is making it better. The nice thing about the March of Times was that they told the story and almost never editorialized. In today's media, that trend is reversed.
Be careful of what you hear in the news. Most of the time it is tilted left and has an agenda to push. There is a message behind the story instead of the story being the message. One of the roles of the media is that they are "agenda setters". They can change the dialogue of the country by deciding to highlight this or that. Right now, the focus is health care, tomorrow, who knows. We can only hope that someday someone will find that story that will open the can of worms that is the REAL economic state of our United States.
The mainstream media of the 1930s wanted to show happy times and try to make people either forget there was a Depression going on or to make them believe it wasn't as bad as people thought it was. The March of Times helped tell the truth and wasn't afraid. The newsreels helped change people's perception of what was really happening in our country at the time.
Likewise on Thursday and Friday of this last week, the mainstream media trotted out economists and ran stories highlighting that the recession was either over or in full recovery. Here's another attempt by our media to pull the wool over our eyes. Our country's GDP dropped 1% instead of 1.5% and the way the media tells it, you would think everything is better now. If it weren't for that pesky high unemployment, record setting deficits and debt, and oncoming inflation, we'd be sitting pretty, right?
As I've stated before, we have an opportunity to talk to people from all over the world and our country almost on a daily basis. The other evening, we were talking to a trucker who hauls all over the country from California to Texas to West Virginia and elsewhere. Yet again, politics or the economy came up in our conversation - no surprise there! Here's a synopsis of what he told us:
This country and people are in real trouble. He's been to several cities where he has seen tent cities and poverty like never before. He's seen people sitting on the side of the road selling their belongings to raise money to survive or to stay in their homes.
The look on his face and in his eyes showed us that what he had seen was probably worse than anything he had seen for quite a long time - and he was an older gentleman so he's probably seen plenty.
My point is that all of this is going on across the country but yet it doesn't get reported, even by Fox News. If ignorance is bliss, then the United States must be a very happy place. To me, the media's lack of coverage of what it is really like around the US is a failure of journalism. Of course if they do cover it, it will be slanted that George W started it all, and Obama is making it better. The nice thing about the March of Times was that they told the story and almost never editorialized. In today's media, that trend is reversed.
Be careful of what you hear in the news. Most of the time it is tilted left and has an agenda to push. There is a message behind the story instead of the story being the message. One of the roles of the media is that they are "agenda setters". They can change the dialogue of the country by deciding to highlight this or that. Right now, the focus is health care, tomorrow, who knows. We can only hope that someday someone will find that story that will open the can of worms that is the REAL economic state of our United States.
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