Mother Davis looks at a crowd of people buying winter clothes, then turns to say,
I thought I had reached my limit of exasperation when it came to what people consider to be news. Then I looked over at Google News this morning and saw that, for about the third day in a row, the former preacher at the church that Barack Obama attends is the top story. Why? Because over the weekend, Jeremiah Wright said exactly the same sort of things that he has said in the past. Barack Obama also has said the same sort of things this week that he has said in the past. Obama says that he rejects Jeremiah Wright’s ideas.
This Jeremiah Wright story, essentially unchanging, has been reported as a top story by mainstream news organizations for two months without letup. Yet, as Jim has ably documented, most American newspapers have completely failed to report that the President of the United States has admitted that he approved of a Cabinet-level conspiracy to torture, devised and set into motion before Abu Ghraib. The New York Times, which loves to think of itself as the nation’s paper of record, did not bother to report the story until eight days after it initially broke.
Yet, all of these newspapers have printed the same unchanging story about Jeremiah Wright, who is not the President and has not broken the law, but expressed opinions some people don’t like, over and over again for two months.
It’s not a problem that’s isolated to Jeremiah Wright and Bush’s torture. In an article last night, Jim explained a similar problem with inflatable pigs and a bill to enable wealthy Americans who don’t work to live off the labor of others completely tax free.
What brings these superficial stories to the top of the news, while truly important stories, like the President coordinating war crimes, or Republican members of Congress trying to abolish taxes on the most wealthy Americans, go almost uncovered at all?
Looking at the Jeremiah Wright story’s place on the top of Google News, I realize that the American news establishment is not the only one to blame. Yes, the quality of America’s journalistic institutions has become alarmingly degraded. However, those institutions have become driven by marketing concerns, considering mostly not the news that’s fit to print, but the news that people will buy.
What that means is that the superficial stories of inflatable pigs and Jeremiah Wright in part do well because that’s what Americans want to read about. Americans don’t want to read that their President approved the program of torture that led to Abu Ghraib, so newspapers don’t write about it. Americans don’t want to read about congressional legislation, even if it means that working Americans pay all the taxes, while heirs to wealthy estates who don’t work at all pay no taxes on their income.
Americans’ democratic thermostats have gone haywire. While the Constitution is being made irrelevant, we’re all listening to the same sermon in somebody else’s church over and over again. While the people we’ve elected to Congress are working to make an American wealthy aristocracy on the backs of working people, we’re watching inflatable pigs float away in the sky.
Putting away her winter coat,
Mother Davis
And the numbers of working Americans holding GOOD JOBS (those that pay at least a living wage) are DWINDLING rapidly as corporate America continues to devastate our quality of life. The news media is a farce, the financial system is on the verge of collapse due to deregulation, the environment is in serious decline, the government doesn’t work for the average citizen any longer (and there’s no means to fix it, despite the rhetoric about voting), and capitalism is ruining both democracy and the environment through corruption and greed. Fat lot of good a new president will be unless it was someone like Nader, Obama or Edwards who would hopefully lead the nation in some real changes by first getting rid of the lobbyists, then encouraging Congress to adopt term limits, and then follow that by getting us off of oil and on to a new energy plan (like investing in solar, etc).
i think we’re pretty much done for as a nation, since we can’t seem to beat the vested interest groups and the complete take-over of the government by corporate America. It’s only going to get worse if people don’t wake up and do something about the ruin of their own country by the wealthy and the “religious right”.