It should come as no shock that, once again, the media is making a mountain out of a mountain now that they are allowed to. In other words, six years after the entire world knew America was in the torture business, it is now front page news. Usually the articles are editorials talking about how “it should be investigated!” (it already has – by lawyers worldwide and for years) and quotes about how “we don’t do that!” and just all around shock and outrage. Even though we’ve known about it for years. The media just didn’t want to get in the doghouse with the Bush administration. So they skirted the edges of the topic and dropped ominous hints on the periphery, but – with few exceptions – left the subject alone.
Alas, it’s a new day. And a new administration. The rules have changed and editors are taking advantage of the fact. Along with the steroid scandal we all knew about and the shitty cars we’ve knowingly driven for years, torture has been known, then ignored. The next outrage will no doubt also be something well known and obvious: prime time television sucks! Sarah Palin is a moron! Our kids are stupid!
The media- and by media I am referring to broadcast and newspapers – the traditional stomping grounds of what was once “journalism.” I’m not talking about tweeting or sidewalk chalk writing or any other confounding fad of useless time consumption. These grey headed dinosaurs are losing their shirts, which is to say billions of dollars, and they are doing anything and everything to right their ships. But the problem is, they all grabbed money from companies that never had any and are no longer able to give them any. Advertising has disappeared because the products that were advertising in newspapers either don’t exist anymore, suck, or offer something nobody is buying. (Like penis enlargement powder. It was a gamble when the stock market was soaring. In a recession it’s not something the desperate feel they can currently afford.) And the corporations that bought up all the newspapers as investments no longer feel like funding them now that they’re deeply in the red. Even though it was there short-term profit mindset that drove them into the red in the first place. Like any bad company that deserves to fail, these corporations forced the hand of newspapers, giving them budgets that forced papers to let go the people who make sure things are spelled right, aren’t pure fabrications, and have some bearing on some fact at some point somewhere. Instead they used spellcheck and hired interns and porn bloggers.
Desperation fuels insanity. Like huge forty foot font headlines screaming that the Bush administration was a pit of criminal dickwads. No! It can’t be! If newspapers and television news want to remain relevant, or aspire to actually become relevant once again, they would do well to hire investigative reporters, pay them in actual money, and have them run around looking for actual news. Actual news is not a nut job with eight tiny little babies. That’s a sociological effect of a culture that worships pure inanity. Actual news is digging up proof Dick Cheney had a torture chamber under the vice presidential lair. Not that we’ve water-boarded countless innocent people in various secret prisons around the world and that many of them had no relevant information and quite a few languished and died once this knowledge was finally realized. It’s horrible. It’s wrong. And highly ineffective. But, sadly, it’s nothing we didn’t already know. It’s time for the media to tell us something we don’t.
