I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The odd thing about the news coverage of the future closing of General Electric’s South Valley jet engine plant is that it didn’t mention the ground water Superfund site that GE has been cleaning up for more than a decade there.
Nor did the coverage mention that the contamination closed down two city wells in East San Jose, and was the object of the largest environmental law suit in the history of New Mexico.
The state filed suit against GE and other corporate polluters for some $6 billion in damages, claiming that the contaminated groundwater would never be drinkable again. The state lost its case in 2007. But GE, under the guidance of the EPA, is still pumping up and cleaning the poison in the water. It could take another 15 years or so to complete. And the aquifer won’t be drinkable even then.
When GE closes its plant, will it continue cleaning up its mess? It’s already cost the company well over $93 million.
Odd that the media mentioned none of this. But I guess it’s not so odd these days.
A highly technological, culturally complicated, democratic society like ours lives and dies by the quality of the information available to it. And we are in deep, deep trouble.
Public relations technologies that flood the news with rumor and gossip has reached a malicious zenith. What do you say when the health industry funds deadly PR pranksters to dream up stories to scare the elderly into thinking that health care reform will eventually call for their euthanasia?
What do you say when a TV news celebrity makes $30 million a year with antics like calling the president of the United States a racist?
What do you say when bully boys, swift boaters, tea baggers are hired to disrupt public meeting on health care reform? It’s like a PR gang shouting obscenities in church while everyone is praying. I believe it’s called disgusting. And it keeps on getting worse, in the vein of a Batman movie.
Vicious jokers, fake news salesmen, industrial corporate PR, paranoia-for-hire TV commentators, and slapstick self-promoters are in charge of information. You keep on wondering how many other guys with red noses and flappy shoes can pile out of the tiny car under the big top and spray the crowds with excrement.
Knowledge itself is under attack. If foaming narcissists keep telling you the world is flat over and over again, with no let up, no peace, some people start to believe it.
From birthers and anvil heads who think racism has been conquered in America to sick joker commentators like Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck the discourse is being shattered.
The sweet idea of truth being able to defend itself and prevail in an honest marketplace of opinion is tarnished almost beyond redemption.
What do you do when a whole segment of the knowledge culture, of which the mass media is part, is willing to say and promote any absurdity, any outrage, any lie to boost ratings?
What do you do when mainline corporate sponsors fund such people? And do so with impunity, without major on-going boycotts of their products.
The overwhelming questions facing the America media today — Who is believable? Who can you trust?
Can you trust news organizations, commentators, bankers, brokers, corporations who stand to make millions and even billions supporting one side of an issue? I don’t think you can.
Why would you believe anything the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries tell you? You don’t think money and power are corrupting? Why would you believe them when they said that public health care breeds socialism, gives power to government bureaucrats over your health care, and will bankrupt the country, when you know that corporate bureaucrats end insurance coverage when people get sick, deny payment, and otherwise wreck health care and endanger lives for reasons of cold hard profit all the time.
Why would anybody believe a man like Glenn Beck who calls the president a racist when he publicly, on the air, ruminates about killing, yes murdering, or hiring someone else to murder, Michael Moore, his liberal adversary?
Why would you believe that it’s in the interests of democracy and open government to allow corporate entities carte blanche in spending as much money as they want to influence elected officials to vote for their views? Why would the conservative majority on the Supreme Court call that freedom of speech?
Why would you buy into that when you own freedom of speech is drowned out by the money megaphone?
When a group like Freedom Works, funded by the corporate underbelly, sends screamers into public meetings to disrupt debates on vital issues, why wouldn’t you think they are robbing you of information, stealing knowledge from you, just to spout the refuse of their own intolerant closed mindedness?
The real story doesn’t matter much anymore. Information is gossip, truth is rumor, evidence is forgery, reason is multi-million dollar flatulence.
When will the stink of this disgusting stuff become unbearable? When will the disgusted rise up, boycott the money sources of the hate clowns, and start to make room for honest differences of opinion?
