Someone please take out Rupert Murdoch

While I decided that the tone of this blog would be very tongue-in-cheek, I really have to get a few things off my chest. I, like many others spend a lot of my day mindlessly browsing news websites, trying to push aside, if even for a moment, the drudgery and boredom of uneventful middleclass existence. Living vicariously through the typewriters of journalists has been a hobby of mine for many years now, but only recently has the astounding level of fresh, steaming BULLSHIT which squeezes through every crevice of the global news media become apparent to me.

This is not a simple case of anti-mainstream "angry disillusioned young silver spoon-fed urban twat with too much time on his hands" rhetoric, there really is an alarming trend of even the supposedly impartial news media towards a more flashy, entertainment-based "fast food" approach.. The combination of the hectic pace of the information age and the increasingly neo-liberal approach (money first, everything else second) to business has also put a real dent in the once revered art of fact-checking. Online and print media frequently relies on news agencies (such as Reuters or STT here in Finland) for their stories, trusting them to properly check the validity of their sources. Sadly, the agencies are just as vulnerable to being forced to deliver on a seconds notice, with quality and truth sometimes taking a back seat.

The media is also alarmingly susceptible to "Flat earth stories", or stories which for some baffling reason the media shoves down our throats without a hint of solid evidence. 2 very good examples are the apocalyptic pandemonium of the Y2K scare and the weapons of mass destruction fiasco leading up to the war in Iraq. Some of us were still in our early teens when the millenium changed, but surely we all remember the headlines where a barrage of experts gave their opinion on the matter. Some were less and some were more optimistic, but NOBODY seemed to point out that there was literally no basis for this claim. Think about it for a second. Since out of every computer system that controls almost everything that happens anywhere in the world exactly ZERO malfunctioned in any sort of way, isn't it reasonable to discern that the media slightly exaggerated the reality of the peril we were all facing?

 The Y2K was an oddball incident in the sense that the media's distortion of reality can not be traced to a clear culprit pulling the strings on the marionette of public opinion. In cases such as the leadup to the war in Iraq, it was obviously the governments of Britain and the U.S who used the media as a tool. But the media should take a large share of the blame, because taking the word of government reports as fact without checking them for basis or merit hardly qualifies the kind of journalism which I expect from my daily source of whats the happyhap.

The difference between the news media and the rest of the media is that people tend to trust what the news say. Berlusconi is not popular in Italy because Italians are idiots. Well they are, but not more so than other humans. Berlusconi controls every single mainstream television station in the country, and you can bet that the picture that is painted of him there is drastically different to the one we have here. The reason for the draconian laws and stone-age attitudes towards drugs in Finland is not because someone doesnt want you to have any fun, but because the people who make the rules and run the newspapers come from an age where using scaremongering over facts was not only acceptable but favored. And because the younger generations are unable look at news with a skeptical eye, we get headlines with celebrities lamenting about the state of the world because their friend likes to do a line of coke every now and then.

What we really need is media criticism to become a compulsory subject in our schools. Kids need to be taught to look at the source where they receive their information with a healthy sense of skepticism, even if the news media has forgotten how to. Nasty shit can happen when bad people with too much money can manipulate the information received by people who have not been taught to distinguish the truth from agenda-driven lies.

The Blog

This blog however, will not be a collection inconsequential rants about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I will periodically look at news items from various sources, dissect them, point out obvious fallacies and offer an alternate view. Sort of like the Daily Show, but less funny and focusing on what you can read online. I'm going to start tomorrow with the whole pig-farming scandal here in Finland. Or maybe something else. We'll see.