THIS WAS ONE OF THOSE days when reading the news had all the appeal of drinking from a stagnant pond, water-skaters, tadpoles, dead toads and all. Typically, when I scan the sites I visit several times each 24 hours, I’m looking for reports that have been mistakenly downplayed (or deliberately minimized) by the mainstream media and upon which I can therefore build a presumably useful and revealing commentary – something that accurately portrays some facet of the human condition in the fourth year of the 21st Century. Yesterday’s UCMJ outrage, by the way, is a fine example of a news item that embodies all those qualities, and on what I consider a “good day,” there will be several such stories to choose from.
But as the election approaches, it seems to me we are drifting ever further into a poverty of real news. A large part of the problem is the mind-numbing extent to which the mainstream media these days focuses entirely too much on personalities even as it excludes exploration of the issues in the presidential campaign – one of which is surely the fact that neither candidate seems willing to go much beyond speaking in generalities. But maybe that is precisely because generalities – easy generalities at that – are the only information the journalists of today are able to convey, whether in print or via broadcast.
I suspect the generalities-only limitation is probably even more widespread than I recognize, partly because – again this is only a suspicion – the reporters and editors for whom it is an unacknowledged rule of craft (or anti-craft) are themselves too under-educated to compare their own work with other examples from other times. The notion that Herodotus or Caesar or Tacitus (or even Shakespeare or Hemingway) might be relevant to modern journalism is dismissed with arrogant jeers. Such is the legacy of “journalism school”: a generation of dunces who have no idea how to evaluate their work in the context of the qualitative dialogue that has gone on amongst all serious writers – journalists included – down through the ages. Most of today’s reporters and editors are so thoroughly brainwashed by “personal-is-political” deconstruction of intellectual standards now foolishly denounced as “patriarchal,” I fear they have become the equivalent of mute singers, blind photographers and deaf musicians, and their output is as accidently foretold by the Bard himself: tales “ told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Hence – a development future generations will no doubt list among the proofs of divine benevolence – the advent of blogs. And one the very best of these is Belmont Club, which here undertakes precisely the sort of reality-check our newspapers formerly did so well, but our massively misguided media monopolies have now abandoned as insufficiently profitable: an overview of Islamic terrorism, with particular attention paid to its abnormal sociology and criminal ethos. If you read nothing else today, read this. Wretchard has outdone himself. The darkness imposed by a generation of dunces may yet be routed by the light.
Curiously, with all the mainstream media’s focus on personalities, there are nevertheless few stories that seem to capture the essence of the people they describe: another symptom of the frustrating shallowness of the present-day Fourth Estate. But here is a short, not-very-well- written item that I think nevertheless captures a truth about the President – especially about why he is so well liked. It is hard to imagine Kerry letting anyone come this close, much less responding as Bush did. And whatever the motive -- even if Bush was prompted by the most cynical sort of political calculation (which I frankly doubt) – there is no question he brightened a little girl’s day as nothing else on earth possibly could. I post this link here because I think this is a portrait of the real George W. Bush: what sort of man he is, and what sort of substance he’s made of.
Posted by Loren at September 30, 2004 07:25 AM