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Education

Comment a comment by gregg451, published on 03 April 2007
Navigate to the top level to view all replies to the article Media's Mission: Entertain or Inform?
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The problem is most people are too dumb to want to watch serious news. Everyone would rather watch the Anna Nichole media storm than anything that really affects their lives. It gives them something to talk about.

The schools have deteriorated so much, at least half the kids are complete fucking retards. Its sad to think how much I hated school, how moronic the teachers were, and it is so much worse now. It is bizzare to be nostalgic over something I hated.

I really think there is a conspiracy to make people dumb by ruining the schools. Then public will fall for any line of bullshit politicians spew out. We have a C-student for president, so why should anyone else be any smarter?

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RE: Education by scottb :: NR7

Let’s be fair. Even the so-called "serious news" on TV today is a joke – people shouldn’t watch it.

On the broadcast channels here in DC, the "news" runs from 4:30am until about 10am (including a couple of "fluff" items like Live with Regis and Kathy Lee and Good Morning America, though it’s mostly actual news programs) and again from 5pm until 7pm (this time, no "fluff").

NBC runs a little longer – they start at 4pm and run through 7:30. In general, these are all network news programs, with only about a half hour of local news in the morning and again in the evening.

"National" news is only moderately important to our daily lives. It’s important to know what’s going on in Iraq, but several hours a day of detailed coverage is way more than anyone not actually participating in it needs. A fifteen minute daily summary and an hour or two of weekly summary would be plenty. The same is true of most national stories.

What affects our daily lives is local news – but the local news we get is all trash. "Human interest" stories about how a local boy scout troop is collecting Silly String to send to the troops to help them uncover IEDs. FUD like how public school children might be "forced" to be inoculated for STDs.

Between the media’s apparent cowardice in actually covering the abuses of the current administration and this overwhelming emphasis on stuff we don’t care about, it’s not at all surprising that nobody wants to watch TV news.

When I ride the subway, I occasionally grab a copy of the free daily paper that the Washington Post puts out. About two thirds of the stories in there aren’t "news" – they’re things I already read about more than a day before from online sources. There’s even one section that I suspect simply trolls Digg to grab a half-dozen stories for the following day’s edition. This hardly motivates me to get the real paper.

Today’s "professional" media needs a major overhaul. They spent the first half of the last three decades pissing away whatever reputation they had as serious sources of news, and the last half ignoring the fact that they’ve been made irrelevant by "new" media.

Posted 03 April 2007, Hide, Parent, Reply

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