Negative Railroad

I was a subscriber to the daily Christian Science Monitor. After a couple of trials, I judged their reporting to be from a neutral viewpoint. Religion appeared in every issue, but did not color the news. The coverage, although U.S.-centered was truly global. And the lighter features were usually interesting (they had great, brief film reviews).

My full-time subscription began around the time the world was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003. I let it lapse after a couple of years because I wasn’t finding the time to read all the coverage they packed into a daily paper. I still followed the website regularly (it’s offered in NRR’s news rack).

H/T: Division of Labour

Whatever the reports from mainstream media, remember that at best they are telling only part of the truth. My intimate knowledge around Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the I-35W bridge, and countless minor events revealed that reporters get confused, lazy and often just make things up.

This maxim should be applied to the coverage coming out of Haiti: The news is not what is happening, it is just what the media is telling you.

Roger Simon (founder of righty Pajamas Media) discovers why I offer Al-Jazeera in the NRR news rack:

The Associated Press reports gives this headline to today’s release of State employment statistics:

July unemployment dips in 17 states, rises in 26

Unemployment is up in over half the States, but AP puts that after the comma, in a position of reduced importance. The ordinary reader will walk away with a notion that unemployment has dipped.

Late last night CNN interrupted its regular drone with a breaking story: Japan Emerges from Recession. They played it up a like an airplane crash or celebrity arrest. They even had to rouse a financial correspondent from sleep to get up-to-the-minute commentary over the phone. Faintly optimistic-sounding news about a government statistic from a foreign economy has become sensational.

Although credit was given to the Japanese government’s stimulus spending, the reporter failed to grasp the (in)significance of figures showing Japan’s domestic demand had continued shrinking. The reported growth was entirely from exports. If anybody’s stimulus is responsible, it must be the Chinese. They’re the only big player still growing demand.

Despite persistent efforts of politicians and pseudo-news organizations like CNN to proclaim the economy has “turned a corner” and is “getting back on track” (someday I’ll have to rant about vapid economic metaphors), the US stock market reacted to this phenomenal news by dropping 186 points (2%).

Progressive Rail, a Lakeville-based shortline railroad, made the news this week:

The neighborhood off Kenwood Trail has become a parking lot for trains, bringing with it more problems than residents would like.

Pam Steinhagen has enough anger to fill a train tanker. She says since last November, the cars have been parked here and have created an eyesore on rails. Not only that, Steinhagen says she's worried about kids who've turned the cars into a playground.

So Steinhagen has organized a neighborhood petition and contacted the city and the company that owns the cars' progressive rail.

Truth is revealed by both what is said and what is not said. Neo-neocon offers a non-conspiratorial reason for following Barry’s birth certificate controversy:

This furtiveness on Obama’s part ties into his secrecy about other aspects of his life. I’m referring most particularly to his school records, from Occidental and Columbia and Harvard Law. These, we know he could release. This failure of his leads inexorably to the perception that the man is hiding something, although we don’t know exactly what or exactly why.

TJIC’s opinion on Cronkite is indistinguishable from my own:

I never got the veneration that some people feel for news anchors.

They’re stuffed shirts, selected for and paid for their ability to project an air of portentiousness and seriousness while they read crappy fourth-rate, low-depth, low-bandwidth news aloud to an audience of admiring monkeys.

Why, exactly, should I care that another one of these hair-gelled used-car-salesmen has passed on?

The Federal Open Market Committee has issued its anticipated statement on interests rates, the money supply, and the overall economy. Here’s the Associated Press version (which I also heard on the radio):

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday said the recession is easing, but that the economy likely will remain weak and keep a lid on inflation.

1) Re: Guantanamo Terrorist Transfers

The media chatter seems focused on the inconveniences and perceived threats to US communities should the detainees be transferred to US prisons. No, they’re not going to escape and become some kind of TV action series bad guy fugitives. And, no, they’re not going to be able to command terrorist activities from within SuperMax confinement. As prisoners, they would represent no credible threat.

If they were brought onto US territory, however, their legal status changes. They would get the full benefit of legal rights and due process. And since they’re being held without charge and on sketchy evidence, US law would compel their release.

Pretty much every media outlet ran a story about yesterday’s national food drive. Letter carriers were lauded for their work collecting donations to food shelves. But were the letter carriers being charitable? Or were they just doing their job?

A brief search of the net offered no evidence that postal workers were doing anything for free. Sure, they carried some extra weight, but should that count as “charity”?

Since they’re in uniform, in addition to all their pay and benefits, the public was also covering any additional risks the workers faced. Strained back from too many cans? Not charity, but a gateway to a compensation claim.

Big Media doesn’t always lie. Despite the transformation from “reporting” to “journalism”, fabricating people and events is still frowned upon. More insidious that outright lies—which can be crushed by genuine reporting and investigation—are lazy half-truths.

Media faces seem to look only as far and as long as needed to satisfy their preconceptions. Hurricane Katrina was a Federal Government (Bush) failure. As long as you focus on the 50,000 safe-but-whining people at the Superdome while quickly skipping past the 7,000 people rescued from imminent death by the Coast Guard.

The current President has changed his tune. He is not longer Tokyo Rose, threatening us with an economic catastrophe. Now, although it may get worse, Obama is confident that the US economy will recover. It’s almost like he took a trip on the Negative Railroad and noticed 140 million Americans still hard at work.

From what I’ve seen, Big Media has followed Barry’s lead. They’re now more apt to look past the still-rising unemployment rate and the 663,000 jobs lost in March. The figures are in scale with January and February, but apparently now it isn’t the end of the world.

Last night CBS aired an interview with the current President. I thought Barry looked he thought he actually understood the issues he was asked about. At least one of us is convinced President Klink can distinguish his ass from a hole in the ground.

And the interviewer seemed troubled, almost reluctant, to ask questions about difficult issues. That reluctance may have been out of sympathy for his President. Or, it may have been pity, as Barry continued to demonstrate he is overmatched by his job. This exchange is an example: