September 05, 2006

More weekend?

Sure.

Sunday was up early for church, and then church itself, and then a lunch there at the building, and then home for a while, where I dozed fitfully on the couch while the kids watched a movie, then back up to the building for a meeting, then evening worship, which I dozed even MORE fitfully through, because it's considered bad form to snore in church, so I had to be VERY fitful to stay awake.

Left the older two girls there for them to go off for the teen devotional after church, we took ourselves on home, ate a bite of supper, then I went BACK to get the girls. Yes, Oldest can drive. No, not after dark on lonely country roads with a passenger, she doesn't. No use tempting fate. So, off with me, then back home again, and FINALLY a chance to get into bed. After first reading the paper, which depressed me to no end.

It used to be that the Birmingham News was equally repugnant to both liberals and conservatives and people who could read above a 6th grade level, but here lately with their move to their new fancy home and their decision to be boldly less fake in their commitment to "objectivity," it's really gone far beyond itself in stinking.

You know--there used to be the way a paper would do a story, say, on the economy. If it was good news, they'd always trot out someone to say it might not be as good as we think. No matter what, no matter how good or bad, it was always exactly offset with a comment from someone on the opposite side. In journalist's eyes, that was called "balance," or "two sides to every story," but as I've said before, it's a false balance.

It's akin to such things as those slow-motion movies you see, where a bowling ball and a feather fall together inside of a vacuum. However, outside the vacuum chamber, some things are unequal, and some things are actually deserving of scorn without the admixture of equivocation. Not all news happens in a vacuum, and in the real world, bowling balls hit the ground before the feather, and they hurt a darn sight more if they land on your foot. It's as if we can't just can't come out and declare Iran's president an anti-everything lunatic, without also noting he's a natty dresser and is a college professor.

Anyway, that was the old way. Now? Well, it seems that if there's any news, it must be seen from a prism of "How Could The Bush Administration Let This Happen?" So not only do we have to tut-tut and note that Ahmadinejad has said some nasty things (not that he really meant them the way they sounded--so, you know, lighten up a bit, Jewish People), BUT we also must note he sees George Bush as a terrorist, and that George Bush NEVER taught college, and everyone KNOWS how unsophisticated he is, that it's no wonder he's messed everything up and gotten us in this mess.

EVERY story in the paper--or so it seems--is nothing more than commentary, or wishful thinking for disaster. The front page news this weekend was not how precipitously gas prices have (and will continue) to fall, but how worried every Alabamian is about, well, about rising gas prices, and everything else. WORRY! WOE! CALAMITIES!! Every opinion given, even if it can be shown to have no basis in fact, is given full credence, and no effort is made to supply anything like factual information. The common tales of woe are accepted by the editors as a sign of Deep Despair, and Distrust, and Possible Democratic Resurgence (we hope!!), and the reader is intended to accept it without question, presumably because it's written in a newspaper.

Even in things intended to be fluff, we wind up get things like this story, which glibly tosses off one of the most exhaustively debunked bits of urban folklore as fact, and uses it in a not-so-veiled slap at American lack of cultural senstitivity:

[...] Rex Parker, who has worked in product development for Nissan, Mazda and Hyundai, and served as vice president of AutoPacific, an industry consultant based in Los Angeles, said automakers need input from locals in other countries on everything from a vehicle's name to preferred colors and options.

"You can't look this stuff up in the dictionary," he said.

If the automaker's message is somehow lost in translation, it could be embarrassing, he said. Consider General Motors' well known gaffe with the Chevrolet Nova. The automaker in the 1970s introduced the vehicle in Mexico, even though the name in Spanish meant "It doesn't go." [...]

Consider this. No. That's wrong. And it never has been right. This article from Snopes.com was online in 1999, and it thoroughly, factually, logically takes apart the myth and shows that it just doesn't make any sense at all.

1999. That's a long time for basic research information to be out there in the ether, so it's not like it's something that just turned up yesterday. Maybe the last paragraph of the Snopes article says it best:

[...] The Chevy Nova legend lives on in countless marketing textbooks, is repeated in numerous business seminars, and is a staple of newspaper and magazine columnists who need a pithy example of human folly. Perhaps someday this apocryphal tale will become what it should be: an illustration of how easily even "experts" can sometimes fall victim to the very same dangers they warn us about.

It's just one article, in one backwater newspaper, but it's sadly indicative of a greater problem facing news organizations, which seem determined to screw themselves into the deepest pit of irrelevancy possibly.

Papers used to at least pay lip service to the idea of garnering facts and truth, but we seem to have run slap into the consequences of a generation of teaching that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and everyone's side of the story is of equal worth. The child and the child molester become merely opposite sides of the same coin.

The press rightly values its freedom and as free people we should all be grateful for it. But our interests are not served by those who would fail us in their most fundamental obligation--to give us light that we might find our own way.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at September 5, 2006 03:42 PM
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