Every time there is a scandal affecting political figures, the electronic media talks of nothing else, all the while lamenting that “it” dominates the news.
Instead of calling in people who have a wide range of knowledge and opinion about the wars we are conducting, those we might be forced to initiate in order to protect Israel, for example against Syria, or about whether the Japanese nuclear meltdown might possibly be affecting the planet’s already out-of-whack climate due to CO2; instead of explaining how the Europeans weather the financial meltdown better than we do because they have long-standing, comprehensive safety nets, our pundits endlessly chew over the same information, ask the same unanswerable questions (will Wiener run to be re-elected to his seat?) seeking to distract us by noise that does nothing to remedy the dire straits we are in.
Ben Bernanke is allowed one minute to warn us that things could really go south, but no one connects the dots to Congress’s discussions about raising the debt ceiling. We are told that failure to do so could result in a downgrading of our credit rating, once again this seemingly banal information is not connected to Bernanke’s warning that ‘things could go south’.
Repeated ‘breaking news‘ alerts hours after the ‘news’ has broken only serve to maintain the illusion that the media is on top of things.
As for MSNBC, at the beginning of the Arab spring at least had reports from Richard Engel in the field. Now it is now content to either chastise (Laurence O’Donnell) or mock (the brilliant Rachel Maddow) our elected officials.
Showing us night after night their foibles does not tell us how to get rid of a system whose ‘Use By’ date has long since past.