Rant Day II   After the graphics intense update that was last week's page, I've decided to take it easy and take the path of least resistance. I'll just start screaming at the top of my lungs at everything that makes me crazy.   You see, for most people, getting seriously pissed off is a tough assignment. For me, getting worked up to a blood pressure so high that that it makes the head-popping scenes from the movie Scanners look like an episode of The Teletubbies, is almost nothing. (Jeeze, talk about a run-on sentence...)   What you are about to read is a rambling mess of ideas that cover a lot of territory in very little time.   I originally started this thing out to gripe about the mainstream media's slanting of the Iraqi war but it got away from me and turned into something else entirely. That's ok. I've been meaning to write something to this effect for years and now it's done.   This Week: The News   I used to have this weird idea in my head about something called Journalism. It was pretty stupid. You're not going to believe this but, man, was I stupid, I used to think that journalism was supposed to be... Promise me you won't laugh... That journalism was supposed to be... Objective...   What an idiot I was...   What I used to think...   I used to think that journalists were people that reported facts and sought to inform the general public of significant events that occurred in the world.   The Honest Truth...   The mainstream media was quite likely never about things like truth and honesty and all of that. When I think about things like the muckrakers of the late 1800s and the early 1900s, I realize that the mainstream media has never really cared about the honest truth.   While truth and honesty are different things, I always kind of assumed that the media really wanted to tell us the honest truth about most things and that errors were probably due more to sloppy work that to intentional manipulation.   Weird Explanation and First Seemingly Unrelated Sidebar: Truth: I intentionally and premeditatedely killed a man. (Truth: I am a murderer.) Honesty: A man was holding my family hostage. I created and executed a plan that resulted in the man's death while saving my family. (Honest truth: I am a hero.)   So... If the mainstream media's goal is not handing out the honest truth, then what are they after?   The Truth... Nothing more.   Answer: The mainstream media has two main goals - - -   Goal 1: Make the general public feel as helpless as possible against "random" misfortunes. This is to be done at all costs.   Rule I: Happy people are nearly impossible to manipulate.   Think about it this way.   If one were to feel that he or she were relatively immune to random misfortunes, how happy would this person be? What if a person were to feel that if they obeyed the rules and acted in a moral fashion, that life would generally work out fine? How scared would this person be to go on living without someone having to protect them? How possible would it be to manipulate someone of this nature into a panic mode? How possible would it be to get this person to storm into the streets protesting one imagined injustice or another?   Rule II: No news is good news.   This does not mean that the absence of news is good news. "No news is good news" means that all news is necessarily bad news.   Let's face it, no-one watches the news because it is happy. Happy news makes people feel like they are living a phony Leave it to Beaver existence. And while watching bad news makes one feel a little better about his or her own lot, there is a deleterious underside to the news that every newscaster exploits at the cost of his or her own soul.   Even stories that have happy endings have the unstated tag line, "Too bad MOST things don't work out this well." In other words, MOST children that wind up missing also wind up dead. MOST lost dogs end up as road-kill. MOST happy couples get divorced. MOST sexually active people get AIDS. You name it, if there's a "happy" story out there, it is accompanied by a huge downside.   Rule III: It's all about power.   While the news anchor has no means to physically or directly manipulate events, a news anchor DOES have the ability to manipulate the masses into taking action on trumped-up causes.   Q: Why would someone do this?   A: Because they can.   While this is an oversimplified answer, it is, in essence, the truth. Better yet, those in the mainstream media do this because they CAN'T do ANYTHING ELSE. People that want to be noticed but cannot create things of value will destroy things of value instead.   Extended Sidebar Mode: ON People that create things of value cannot help but to be noticed. People that cannot create things of value will be not noticed unless they do something drastic.   Most people may think that Creating Things of Value consists of writing artificial intelligence software, curing diseases, and saving humanity from impending disaster, this is far from the truth.   Think about it. When the restaurant delivers a decent meal at a good price, you notice it. When a person does a job efficiently, you notice it. When someone helps you do YOUR job efficiently, you notice it. Any time someone adds value to your life, no matter how small, you notice it.   These things are of value and have been created by other people and these add value to your life.   Journalists, in general, do not add value to your life.   When a journalist tells you that you will likely die of cancer in spite of your efforts to live a healthy life, this does not add value to your life and yet you notice it. (Do they tell you how to AVOID cancer? No. They just leave you with this sense of impending doom.) When a journalist tells you that a child was kidnaped "randomly" and refuses to give the entire story, this does not add value to your life and yet you notice it. (The Whole Story: Had Elizabeth Smart's parents decided that homeless vagrants are called "undesirables" for a reason, they would likely not have exposed their child to this element of humanity. What are the chances that you, as a parent, would bring a wandering drunk into your home to help with chores? Did the news focus on this? Not really. Focusing on this aspect of the story would have made the "randomness" of this event a null point thus negating the entire "point" of the story.) When a journalist blatantly spins a story to match their political views, this does not add value to your life and yet you notice it. (The book is called Bias, read it. The Steve Forbes story is absolutely frightening.) When the journalists show protesters in Washington wailing about how fiscal responsibility results in old people dying due to "cutbacks" in the Medicaid (Medicare? I'm not sure which one) program and do so without advising that "cutbacks" still results in an INCREASE in benefits to the program recipients, this does not add value to your life and yet you notice it. (Wolf Blitzer stepped off the political edge and actually ASKED Bill Clinton about this and was nearly excommunicated from the mainstream media for his pursuit of the truth. Guess what Mr. Blitzer found out? Yup... Medicaid benefits WERE being increased, just not at the same amount as the previous year.)   Extended Sidebar Mode: OFF   Anyway...   This first goal (You remember the first goal? Make the general public feel as helpless as possible against "random" misfortunes?) dovetails with the second goal...   Goal 2: Create a need for Someone Else (AKA Uncle Sam/The Church/Anyone But You) to take responsibility for preventing these "random" misfortunes.   This is the ultimate payoff for the media. Just like a child that stomps on an anthill to see the scurrying that goes along with an invented disaster, the media thrives on watching the public panic about a "disaster" that they essentially created out of nothing.   How are these panics created? Simple...   Method 1: Omit Important Facts.   There was a kid here in the Denver area that was killed in a drive by shooting in the early 1990s. He was four years old. The uproar in the Denver area was phenomenal. Reported Fact 1: The kid (Casson Evan) was in a car. Reported Fact 2: There was a drive-by shooting. Reported Fact 3: The drive-by occurred in a "tough" neighborhood. Reported Fact 3: The drive-by shooting resulted in the child's death. Reported Fact 4: (Note: this fact was mentioned quietly.) The drive-by shooting occurred at 10:00 PM.   Extended Sidebar Mode: ON AGAIN In order to drive home the idea that random misfortunes can happen to anyone, it is important to contrast the people that the event DID happen to the people that the event did NOT happen to. This is what I call The Story of the Near Miss.   The Story of the Near Miss goes like this: A tornado hits a home. It is a Nice Home. The people that live there are Nice People living Nice Lives. One day a tornado hits the Nice Home filled with Nice People and they all die Not-So-Nice Deaths. A GOOD reporter will find someone that witnessed this event to show that this could have happened to anybody... Option 1: (Good.) Show Nice Family #2 saying that they saw Nice Family #1 die Not-So-Nice Deaths. Option 2: (Better.) Show Drunken Family saying that they saw Nice Family Not-So-Nice Deaths.   The Story of the Near Miss provides "proof" that anything can happen to anybody at any time. The greater the contrast between the Lucky and the Unlucky, (the emphasis being that the Unlucky should have been the dirty-rat-bastards that SHOULD have been killed in the disaster), the better the story.   In any case, The Story of the Near Miss should be had whenever possible. If there is no Story of the Near Miss, then, quite simply, the story was not to be had. Period.   Extended Sidebar Mode: OFF AGAIN   Back to the drive by...   There was no Story of the Near Miss associated with the drive-by shooting because there no story to be had. If there were a Story of the Near Miss, then someone would have been on the air saying something like, "The bullet went right by me and into the kid." This story could not be had because THERE WAS NO-ONE IN THE CAR WITH THE KID WHEN IT HAPPENED!!!   Think about it...   If the message is supposed to be, "This could have been YOU!" then what are the chances that you, as a responsible parent, would be caught in the following situation.   Your 4 year-old child is in a car alone At 10:00 PM In a "tough" neighborhood   I am not saying that the child or the parents deserved any of this, I am just saying that most people would not have felt so scared had they been aware of the entire truth. That the news intentionally omitted certain facts for the sake of a desired effect.   Method 2: Selectively Use Statistics.   "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. " --Mark Twain   In the mid 1990s, Denver TV stations were going wild over the "fact" that a number of people lost their lives on highway C-470 over a short period of time. One set of deaths occurred because of a ladder falling off of a truck. Another set of deaths occurred due to teenagers driving like idiots. Other deaths occurred because of various driver errors. The news reported things like "Yet another death on highway C-470. Details at ten." I remember ranting like a lunatic because the news was bending the story completely out of proportion.   The statistics were showing that deaths on C-470 were up eight-quadra-trillion percent but the news anchors made no effort to show that the deaths were actually linked to the road itself. There was also no attempt to show that other years also had the same number of deaths. They did not say that the accidents were due to the road being in disrepair or that the road was not monitored and that the lack of state troopers caused people to drive like maniacs or anything else for that matter. It was simply being implied was that C-470 was killing people all by itself. The end.   Kathy, my wife, got mad at me for getting angry with the news. She said that they were just "reporting the facts." She really didn't understand that the news was trying to create a furor over something that was nothing more than a statistical fluke. It wasn't until one station showed a state patrol officer stating wildly, "The answer is NOT closing down C-470!" that Kathy understood that I wasn't the only one seeing the lunacy in these reports.   I'm waiting for the day that the news reports, "Nearly one-hundred percent of all people that die on U.S. highways have consumed milk sometime in their lives."   (Odd note: I made this same point on local talk radio and noticed six weeks later that Rush Limbaugh started saying similar things on his show. He substituted the "milk" argument with "carrots." Anyway, just a wierd thing...)   Method 3: Ignore Context.   Do you remember the Summer of Shark Attacks a couple of years ago? Did you know that the number of attacks was actually lower than average?   Ignoring context goes hand-in-hand with the selective use of statistics. When the news reports that cancer is on the rise, the viewer should immediately go to their computer and find out if life expectancy is going down. If life expectancy is going down, then is this trend attributable to the increase in cancer? What I find astounding is that newspeople can report that cancer is on the rise one night and then report that life expectancy is on the rise the next night. And they do this without so much as a grin.   Cancer Context: Cancer is a disease that occurs as cells replicate over and over during the course of one's life. The more that the DNA is copied and regenerated, the more likely that an error in the duplication will occur. the longer you live, the more chances that DNA errors will occur. Errors in DNA duplication are, for the most part, the cause of cancer. While things like smoking and other things can accelerate the errors, the truth is that many types of cancer occur simply because we are living longer. In other words, increased life expectancy "causes" cancer. How's THAT for context?!?!   Yeah. And they wonder why I scream at the TV.   No, it's not funny, and, no, it's not what I originally intended to write but it was fun...   Next Week: More whining about TV...   Copyright 2003 by Frank Emsley