MEANINGLESS CHATTER

I find myself spending a lot more time with my friend the TV, especially on rainy days like the present, or early nights like in the winter, and a lot of it is listening to what my lawyer friend refers to as "The talking heads". I am beginning to see what he means. Much of it is meaningless, mindless, chatter, the predictions or viewpoints of people who have proved themselves wrong, so many times, whose grasp of history is so short, and feeling of rightness in their own opinions so great, that I wonder why I listen to them at all. Worse is listening to the "Man on the street' interviews, or the latest polls, as if we had something to learn from these people. Even worse than this is the media, in their effort to be even handed, who publish, or give voice to everything, every side of an issue, even if it is a heap of blatant untruths. I often think back to the following story.

We had Robert St. John, renowned journalist, speak to us many years ago, but he left me with a message I never forgot, and never stop using as a measure when I hear news that tries to be evenhanded, at the expense of truth. His story went like this:

Imagine you are in a windowless newsroom, and a reporter comes in and says, "What a beautiful day, as nice as it gets, the sun is shining, and the temperature is perfect". Minutes later another reporter comes in and says, "What a miserable day, raining cats and dogs and very cold". Now does the newscaster, for the sake of evenhandedness, broadcast both stories, or does he get up off his chair, go out where he can see what is happening, and choose only the correct version?

Our news media seem to have become too lazy to "fact check" everything they hear, and trying so hard to be "fair", they give voice to everything, even if it is totally untrue. As individuals we too often do the same thing, sending on everything we may get over the internet, without checking its validity. Most often our own common sense should have sent us the warning lights, but we either never had any common sense, lost our common sense, or ignore it altogether.

I think we are also a product of a child rearing system that put too much stress on listening to everyone equally, and never applied the yardstick of who was expressing worthwhile ideas, intelligently. We don't seem to have been taught how to ferret out fact from fiction, or distinguish a valid argument from an invalid argument, or even not to compare apples to oranges.

I will give an example from the MSNBC program Morning Joe, (Oct. 16) about New Orleans. It is four years later, progress has been made, especially lately, but much is left to do. But no discussion on the program ever included the fact that much of New Orleans was, and still is, in a maximum danger zone and should not be rebuilt. They got away with living way below sea level for a long, long time, but the truth of the risks involved was always known. The political situation was always bad, apparently city wide and state wide, and how much has that improved? Then the fact that Obama, whose visit brought all this up, was criticized because he did not go to Mississippi, as if there were equal problems to solve there. It was just a few days before, that someone we met from Mississippi, was telling us what a good job his state had done compared to Louisiana. I'll believe him, before Joe Scarborough, who was only trying to make a political point. Then over and over I heard repeated, if the same thing had happened in a wealthy suburb, (and many examples were given), it would not be in the same state four years later. What a stupid statement! People in wealthy suburbs have insurance on their homes; of course they will be repaired and rebuilt as quickly as possible, with little or no federal assistance. We went by some wealthy islands in the Keys that had been wiped by Hurricane Andrew a year before, and the damage was hardly apparent.

To get back to New Orleans, it seems everyone at the studio just wanted to get on the bandwagon and register their sympathies, while disparaging Obama, even though the people on camera, seemed happy about his visit. The fact that he went on to a fundraiser in California, as if New Orleans meant nothing, was played over and over. Guess if Obama didn't want to give Joe fodder for his criticizing mill, he never should have scheduled the visit to New Orleans. Talking heads, talking heads.