Information in shackles
I was chatting with a Vietnamese woman a few days ago. She told me that her brother in Vietnam had called her after seeing the Interstate 4 disaster in Central Florida on January 9. A combination of smoke from a controlled burn gone wild and fog had turned the main roadway between the west coast of Florida and Orlando into a tangle of trucks on fire, cars crushed like beer cans and charred bodies. As my husband later commented, the scene recorded by our local 24-hour news station’s helicopter looked like Armageddon from the air.
The woman was amazed that her brother in Vietnam had seen the same footage and heard the same story before she had. After all, it had happened in Lakeland, which is two counties east of us, not halfway around the world. “The news here is news in Vietnam,” she marveled.
As the media make the world a smaller village where news and false information travel at the speed of light, the average Vietnamese with a TV set and access to the internet can join us in watching the man-made and nature-made disaster on Interstate 4. Communities in past centuries would wait for news to arrive by word of mouth or for reports on the next day’s or next week’s newspaper.
We no longer have the luxury of not knowing, which creates the tyranny of knowing too much without actually knowing much. Reading comprehension and knowledge of issues facing voters have plummeted as the mass media bombard us with celebrity gossip instead of unbiased discussions of more important concerns.
Yesterday, I learned another lesson about the shoddy job that corporate-controlled media outlets does when covering issues that affect the average citizen.
On Friday, our daily newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, reported that U.S. Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young was running for a 20th term in Congress. (That would be 40 years in the House representing the 10th District, for those who don’t want to do the math.) Popularly known as one of the congressional Kings of Pork, Rep. Young chairs important committees and brings millions back to Pinellas County from the federal government and defense contractors. The community center where my children play basketball has a plaque thanking His Highness of Appropriations for the funds that built it. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
Rep. Young and his wife have long laid claim to supporting veterans and the armed forces, although the military seems to have more sway than disabled veterans in their circle. Last year, reporters uncovered the shameful scandal of the wards at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where young veterans are getting substandard care from injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moldy walls, filth, inadequate care and horrific neglect were revealed in a newspaper series by the Washington Post. Rep. and Mrs. Young were asked why they hadn’t moved heaven and earth to have Congress and the public jump on the issue to make sure that the injured vets were taken care of. Their response had been to ignore it until the Post’s series made it public.
According to the Congressional Quarterly, “C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., former chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said he stopped short of going public with the hospital’s problems to avoid embarrassing the Army while it was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” He and his wife stopped visiting the wards at Walter Reed instead of making a difference. As a voter and a Christian, I was ashamed at their response.
I mention Rep. Young’s run for a 20th term and Walter Reed because the St. Petersburg Times chose to say on January 18 that there were no “high profile challengers” for his seat. Our friend and neighbor, Samm Simpson, ran against Rep. Young in 2006 and received about a third of the vote without her opponent’s deep pockets. She’s running against him in 2008, too.
It didn’t surprise me that the Times wasn’t about to disturb the status quo by reporting on Samm’s positions and her qualifications as a way to to actually raise her public profile. The reporters who wrote the story simply decided they weren’t going to give her a chance. (In fact, they were also the ones reporting on Rep. Young’s “pork” designation in an earlier piece.)
These were not reporters writing editorials; they were news reporters whose bias isn’t supposed to show like a soiled slip under a Dior gown. I fired an email to the reporters, which the paper will probably run as a letter to the editor–or maybe they won’t. Either way, I let them know that at least one reader noticed their bias. There may be a handful of others who noticed and who will take the time to send their own comments.
As national and local media grow increasingly more controlled by corporations, the message is getting more homogeneous. Dissent and discussion are becoming rare in print and electronic media. Right-wing hacks seem to own the radio airwaves and the same tired message about the same sanctioned candidates fills every TV newscast. Newspapers rarely admit other voices to their op-ed pages or their editorial boards.
The internet is the only medium that gives readers a choice of voices. News sites, overseas papers with a net presence and blogs offer a way around the American corporations’ clamp on information. The St. Petersburg Times can opine in a news story that our friend Samm Simpson doesn’t have a chance in hell to run against Rep. Young and it’s allowed.
As news travels faster–from Lakeland to Vietnam instantly–it also becomes more hackneyed. Instant access to information that doesn’t have free expression isn’t progress at all; it’s high-tech propaganda.
I always marvel at how prescient George Orwell was when he wrote 1984, a novel I return to regularly; in fact, it’s time to reread it now that a new year is here. In Orwell’s dystopian society, there are certain times of the day when hate messages are broadcast to keep the population in a state of anger and fear in much the same way that Rudy Giuliani keeps harping on 9/11 as a campaign issue. (U.S. Sen. Joe Biden told a newsman that a typical Giuliani sentence consists of “a noun, a verb and 9/11.” I laughed out loud.)
The high-tech propaganda that blasts us with the same controlled messages 24 hours a day showed its ugly bias when it told St. Petersburg Times readers not to consider Samm Simpson’s candidacy, although the paper would protest that it reveres the First Amendment. Unless voters take the time to sift the paper’s opinion from the facts, a sincere, compassionate candidate like Samm will be shut out of the political process, which would be a loss for the 10th District.
Information in shackles doesn’t benefit a free people, no matter how quickly it can reach halfway around the world.
