The New Orleans Slaughter – How Media Munchkins Compound Misery
The Electronic Media is so busy repeating Headlines – 15 people were killed in a savage attack --- that it never devotes any time toward untangling the dirty motifs and machinations behind the crime
By
David Gottfried
It’s Official: The electronic News Media will make you a dunce, a boob and an ignorant boar who has no idea what’s going on. (By electronic media, I am referring to Radio and Television and everything you learn on the internet through images and sounds as opposed to the written word.)
Reading the News Will Always Transmit More Content Than Listening to or Seeing the News.
I am not claiming the written word is superior simply because I once was a sarcastic and snotty intellectual snob. (I am still snotty and sarcastic, but whether my acerbic commentary is still invested with the cerebral charm of my youth is debatable.) I am claiming that the written word will teach us more than listening with our ears because most of us can read much, much faster than anyone can speak.
Concretely, this means that in 1 minute I may read 700 words but only hear 170 spoken words. Hence, more content is always transmitted in reading than in listening. Also, photographs and film footage compromise our comprehension of the news. For example, shortly after Sadaam Hussein fell, Americans were treated to film footage of about 100 people ripping down a statue of Sadaam in Baghdad. Some American commentators said that this proved that Sadaam was hated by his people. Because the news was presented as film footage, we reacted with more excitement and almost happiness as we turn to pictures like babies to the breast. And as we lap up the pictures, our critical thinking is suppressed (We are enjoying the film footage so much that we won’t question the commentators who said that the toppling of Sadaam’s statue, by 100 people, proves that the Iraqis hated Sadaam.). If we had instead read that 100 people had demolished a statue of Sadaam, we would have asked, “How does the media talking head know that those 100 people were representative of the 18 million people who live in Iraq.” There are many other reasons why reading the news teaches us more than listening to the news, and I have discussed them in other essays on substack.1
Of course, most Americans no longer read anything and hence are more inclined to be fat, stupid, shmucks who are easy captives of Donald Trump and other demagogic despots of our intellectually bankrupt electronic age. We are bombarded with so much “music” and noise and worthless chatter – in my gym, three different sound systems are belting out three different filthy songs belted out by three different Amazonian bitches – that, in the aggregate, is nothing but an avalanche of godforsaken static.
The Abomination that is our Trite Use of Language
Certain ways of speaking are pathological. One of these aberrant forms of talking has been termed, by psychiatrists, “perseveration.”
Perseveration constitutes the tendency to repeat oneself, again and again, ad nauseum. It is an all-time favorite rhetorical device of nagging moms, obnoxious bosses, dreary and didactic teachers, and bratty “friends” who love to say, “I told you so.”
And it is a favorite habit of CNN, MSNBC and FOX News. They will tell us, once every 300 seconds, that 10 people were killed in New Orleans in a Tragic assault (shortly thereafter they raised the death toll to 15).
They are so busy repeating the headline that they never divulge the meat and guts of a story. Of course, it is probably far too soon for many or any journalists to have gotten the inside story of the horrific New Orleans crime, but that doesn’t make it sensible to repeat the same damn headline – 15 dead -- with the regularity of an annoying hick-up.
My hunch is that they will continue to just repeat the headline without revealing the ugly guts of the story even after relevant facts are amassed by enterprising reporters. Just look at the last election:
MSNBC and CNN, reputedly liberal, helped Trump when they repeatedly reported this headline: Trump faulted Biden for withdrawing from Afghanistan and behaving, essentially, like a limp-wristed Mc Govern Democrat who brown-nosed dictators. However, I never heard those miserable stations bother to edify their audience by noting that Donald Trump had agreed, with the Taliban, to give Afghanistan back to the Taliban, Osama Ben Ladin’s number one ally !! Since Trump had actually agreed to completely give-up and surrender Afghanistan to some of the most putrid people on the planet, he had no business criticizing Biden for implementing his horrible decision. Furthermore, I never heard any of those BS phony liberal stations say that if Biden had not withdrawn from Afghanistan, we could have been charged with violating our contractual obligation to do so and that other nations might doubt our trustworthiness.
(Whenever something bad transpires, the comatose cretin who reads the news tells us that a “tragedy” happened. Ergo, the New Orleans carnage is being called a tragedy. Although the English language has many different synonyms for a bad event – calamity, catastrophe, cataclysm – the douchebag newscasters are using the wrong word.
The concept of tragedy came from Ancient Greek Drama and more specifically the tragic figures of their ancient plays. A tragic figure was a person who had great talent, ability and goodness who nevertheless made excrement of his life because of one overriding, invincible flaw or defect of character. So tragic and tragedy do not merely connote that which was bad or painful; it referred to the conquest of a good and benevolent soul by strains in his character that led him astray. The English language has so many words – about 5 times as many words as French – not because we are verbose or want to be villainously confusing to people who suffer English as a second language but because we are more apt to try to precisely express and delineate the many shades of meaning.)
The Crimes Almost Never Discussed: The Surge in Purchases of “Shorts” in Airline Stocks immediately before 9/11.
We have heard a million times that the attack of September 11, 2001 was terrible. And it was terrible. But we should have more illuminating news coverage so we can do a better job of identifying and punishing the guilty parties. The media should have done something else besides readying Rudy Guiliani for canonization.
For example, I remember, very clearly, that the New York Times reported, sometime in the autumn of 2001, something with the most ghastly implications. No one else ever followed up on that story. The Times reported that a big increase in the purchase of shorts was made, on airline stocks, on the eve of September 11.
People buy “shorts” on stocks when they think stocks will decline in value. Why did the purchase of shorts on airline stocks soar immediately before September 11 ? Because a lot of people thought airline stocks would soon tumble in value. Of course, after September 11, airline stocks collapsed in price.
Shorts are generally not purchased by ordinary upper middle-class people. They are purchased by fat cats in the know who have inside information as to why a stock is about to stumble into quicksand. Think about it: A lot of those shorts were probably purchased by Saudi Princes.
(Churchill, when speaking of the Royal Airforce, which narrowly saved Great Britian from defeat at the hands of the Nazis, said that never before in the history of war had so many people owed so much to so few. I will paraphrase Churchill by saying that never before in the history of economic combat have so few people – the Saudi princes – made so much money by doing so little good, and so much harm, for the rest of humanity.)
And some of the men on Wall Street must have wondered why the purchase of shorts soared immediately before 9/11. And while some of those Saudi princes were gulping fine whiskey in New York (The love to drink when they are out of the clutches of their “Mommie Dearest” Nanny State.), they succumbed to vino veritas (divulging secrets while drunk) and some of those princes may have spilled the beans regarding 9/11. And those Wall Street traders, like the Saudi Princes, who knew about 9/11, aided and abetted 9/11.
However, you probably never heard about this if you were a dutiful dog accepting as gospel truth the gibberish spouted by the pretty, blow dried newscasters on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and ABC. Very simply, they know that the grown-up children who watch their “news” programs are still at the picture book stage of intellectual development. The little, stupid people will only listen to news stories if they are accompanied with lots of gory pictures with people spurting blood.
(Watching the news is sort of like Schadenfreude, getting pleasure from other people’s pain. When I saw “Schindler’s List,” I wanted to kill not only the Nazis in the film, but so many people in the audience, grotesque gluttons greedily and happily eating ice cream and hot dogs while watching pictures of people slaughtered. I could not eat. I thought it would have been immoral – my Grandmother refused to eat when Mussolini bombed Ethiopia -- and fundamentally Unkosher to find pleasure in the flesh of a hot dog while seeing people die.)
Of course, the machinations of traders and princes who made a mint by buying shorts on airline stocks is not something that can be relayed with pictures, unless one wants to fill a news feed with pictures of contracts to buy shorts. Perhaps “The Onion” is the only sort of journalistic outfit that can make a story, about the purchase of shorts, economically viable: They can give us displays of gorgeous girls in scant and scintillating Daisy Dukes.
America Still Doesn’t Know What Caused the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 because “Credit Default Swaps” are not picturesque.
Some people, easily swayed by the bullshit news of Fox, which insidiously becomes part of the story line of MSNBC and CNN, had the idea that the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 came about because of permissiveness and excessive liberality in the extension of credit to subprime (or economically challenged) home buyers. Their simplistic conception of the crisis amounted to this: A bunch of poor slobs who shouldn’t have bought houses purchased homes, and their defaults destroyed the American economy.
In fact, a bunch of erudite and urbane sheisters from firms such as Goldman Sachs (The source of many of the Treasury Secretaries of the United States) bought “credit default swaps,” essentially bets that many subprime mortgages (loans to poorer home buyers) would default. At the same time, their confederates drafted contracts, with subprime borrowers, which dramatically increased the risk of default with plenty of punitive provisions (Usually severe penalties, and huge increases in liability, because of late payments). So these hot shots from Wall Street A) devised contracts that increased the risk of a default and B) betted that the subprime borrowers would default. The collapse of the subprime market metastasized to affect the entire real estate market, and when real estate capsizes, the entire economy goes into a tailspin.
The financial issues at stake could not be displayed with scintillating film footage and so the electronic media blithely pretended as if credit default swaps never existed.
The media was so damn indolent and brainless that it let con artists suggest that the entire collapse was caused by bums who should not have gotten loans in the first place. The people who said that poor slobs caused the Great Recession soon became the tea partyers. Do you remember the Tea Party? It was a right-wing bloc designed to cripple every decent reform devised by Obama.
Do you remember the biggest complaint of the tea party ? The tea party shmucks, and their leader, Donald Trump, said that the biggest problem in the country was high Federal deficits.
And when Donald Trump became President, he gave us deficits that were so gargantuan they made the Obama deficits look like spare change a kid lost when he bought good humor popsicles.