Tabloid America versus the Real World

© 2014 Peter Free

 

14 May 2014

 

 

One would think that the world’s most powerful nation’s media might take its reporting and accountability role more seriously — but no

 

Prominently in the American news, most of these last few days, have been:

 

 

the daily media frenzy over billionaire Donald Sterling’s addled-brain racial comments

 

a story about Alec Baldwin apparently doing what he seems to do best

 

followed by The Atlantic Wire’s heavy-weight gem entitled, “The Truth About Translucent Powder and Why Angelina Jolie's Face Looked Weird Last Night”

 

and

 

the Los Angeles Times remarkably important revelation that, “Woman claims Justin Bieber stole her cellphone at miniature golf course”

 

So on, day after day, year after year.

 

This is — one can behaviorally infer — all the “stuff” that American citizens absolutely need to know, as their national government increasingly runs rampant doing bad things for poor reasons or nothing at all for equally weak ones.

 

 

Meanwhile . . .

 

Mostly ignored or superficially reported:

 

 

the NSA stomps all over our Constitution-protected privacy

 

the Obama Administration casually prolongs its no accountability drone-murder program in Yemen and other places

 

French journalist Camille Lepage gets murdered in the increasingly desperate Central African Republic war — while Al Jazeera journalists rot in an Egyptian jail for having done their jobs

 

two hundred-plus miners expire in a Turkish mine disaster

 

Ukraine continues to bubble — but with no accurately undertaken media investigation of who is instigating what to whom

 

China has upped the danger stakes in the Pacific by reportedly beginning to build an airstrip on a South China Sea reef that the Philippines claim

 

and

 

the United Nations’ Syrian war mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi — following in his equally frustrated predecessor’s steps — resigned after two years of determined effort, due to intransigence from virtually everybody connected to that wrenching situation.

 

And so on.

 

 

The moral? — A sense of reasoned proportion seems not to be an American virtue

 

Making us questionably qualified self-alleged leaders of the world, with an atrociously irresponsible and mostly unintelligent media to prove it.

 

 

Note

 

For people interested in competent, in depth and balanced reporting, check out:

 

Shane Smith’s superb weekly HBO news show, Vice 

and

 

Al Jazeera America’s cable television news service.

 

Both predominantly focus on ordinary people’s lives.  Both are the best of their type.

 

Admirably supplementing these, in documentary form, is PBS’s Frontline.