Media for Morons

Stupid Sells
Even in such hard times that the 7-11 is looking like a luxury boutique to the ever growing minions of misery, we abide a politics that limit us to a minimum of ideas and even fewer solutions.
It’s worse than that. How many countries do you know of where stupidos form an influential, if not thoughtful, constituency? This week, the Washington Post allowed Sarah Palin, who promises to get back to us on all matters of substance, to weigh in on the Copenhagen confab. “My daddy told me about that snuff,” she reputedly said. “I hope they have enough spitoons.”
Meanwhile, NPR, America’s topical anesthetic, dispatched anchor Robert Siegel to share some warm and fuzzies with Texas teabaggers. Siegal, who reserves his snide asides for those challenging conventional wisdom, was all empathy when it came to the blitherings of these yahoos, who are to conservatism as Groucho is to Marxism.
If you have some memory cells left, you’ll recall that last summer the vidiot box was awash for days with images of these irate and inane rubes besieging pols at town meetings with mispelled banners and malapropic maledictions. Siegel may be short those cells. Instead of remembering those images, he pretended some vague and distant negative characterization of the teabaggers. Catch this exchange with Lorie Medina, a leader of the group :
SIEGEL: One association that your detractors from afar have with the Tea Parties is rowdiness. It's being willing to shout down other people.
Ms. MEDINA : Yes, definitely, definitely anger. I think some people were scared. They're scared about where the country is going, and so I think it was a lot of emotions that erupted this last summer. And I think if the politicians think that that was the end of it, I think they've got another thing coming.
SIEGEL: Is Barack Obama a lightning rod for all this? I mean, does he infuriate the people who...?
Ms. MEDINA: Yes.
SIEGEL: Yes. Why? What it is about him that annoys people so much?
Ms. MEDINA: You know, it's like I wake up every morning, and there's something new on the news that's upsetting that I read about that he does. I mean, if you said, Lorie, list for me everything that he has done that has upset you since he's become president, I don't think there's any way I could list it all. There's so much. You know, the fact that he apologizes for our country every time he goes overseas. I don't know that I've ever heard him say anything good about America. If you look at the way he speaks, the way you - he talks about our country, if you look at the programs and the things he tries to put into place, it really appears that he does not love our country like most Americans do and like past presidents do.”
Now, let’s review. NPR’s All Things Considered put its senior anchor and presumably a sound tech on a plane to Texas, paid their expenses, plus those for editing the recordings, and then inflicted the drivel they gathered on its millions of listeners. The money media get away with this by claiming that their job is not to ignore idiocy and look for truth but simply to report the news. Of course, they decide what the news is. Or rather, those decisions are made to please the same corporate sponsors who coincidentally write off the permanently lunching teabaggers as a public relations expense.