Out Sick

Hello my blog reading knuckleheads. I’ve been away for awhile due to illness. An infection named Bertram climbed into my nose, burrowed into my nasal cavities, and filled my sinuses up with mucous. He packed it in so tight my head started to throb and hasn’t stopped for 6 days. Oh, that Bertram.

I’m going to kill him. Bertie is a dead infection. He sleeps with the bacteria. I want him dead, I want his microorganisms dead, I want his pathogens burned to the ground.

I didn’t do much last week except swallow pills and watch TV. I channel surfed a lot and found a few things out. There are a lot of people living in the swamps of Louisiana and they all have their own TV shows now. Swamp People, Swamp Hunters, Swamp Loggers, Gator Boys, Swamp Thing . . . no, wait, that was a comic book. Anyway, there are a ton of film crews in the marshes following these toothless people around while they shoot gators, speak in an accent that only they can understand and apparently live their version of the American Dream.

Also on my viewing list were CNN and MSNBC. I thought about watching Fox News but decided to keep the few brain cells I have left. What I noticed about the other alphabet news networks is every hour a new program begins: “Blah Blah with So-and-So”, and these shows are virtually identical. They all talk about whatever the big story of the day is and they all have 4 guests at the same time to discuss it. “Please welcome senior political writer for HeyIHaveAWebsite.com, Ralph Jester; former republican senator Larry Wellsley; democratic strategist Janet Frood and the janitor from this building, Earl Johnson.” After about 4 hours of this nonsense you’ve listened to the same stories until nausea has set in and your head is filled with the banal opinions of people you don’t respect or care about.

And just what the hell is a “senior political writer” at a news-based web site? Does that mean he was the first guy hired when they got their start-up money? Half of these “senior” writers look like they’re 12.

Maybe I’m just cranky from being sick but day time TV sucks. Time for my meds.

Out of Context

The big story in the news right now is Shirley Sherrod, an employee of the USDA and an African American, resigning under pressure after Fox News showed a videotape of a speech she made where she seems to admit to showing prejudice against a white family she was supposed to help when they were about to lose their farm. The one problem is Fox edited the video before showing it. If you viewed it in its original form you find out the incident she’s talking about happened over 20 years ago and the whole reason she was telling the story was to illustrate that she realized her feelings were wrong. She changed her mind and did help the white farmers and not only saved their farm for them, but became life-long friends with the now elderly couple.

I was wondering how Fox News would feel if say, MSNBC, showed video about them, only they edited it first to, oh let’s say LIE to the public. I think it would go something life this:

In an interview night time gas bag Sean Hannity says “I’m a Dickensian scholar. Charles Dickens’ writing has guided my life”, but MSNBC airs Sean saying only “I’m a Dick.”

Prime time bag o’ shit Bill O’Reilly had this story to tell: “I was in Vegas recently. You know I’m not an easy sell, but I was knocked off my ass by an amazing show starring a clown with a monkey. There is no doubt this lends clowns new credibility in the industry.” But this is what MSNBC airs on Countdown: “I’m an ass clown with no credibility.”

Let’s say Glenn Beck was doing one of his unfunny comedy routines where he compares everything he doesn’t like or agree with to the Nazis. Instead of showing his performance as he filmed it, MSNBC put on the screen a still picture of Glenn with his arm in the air and behind him they played the soundtrack to an old Nazi propaganda movie with the crowd repeatedly shouting “Sieg heil!”

What if there was a story about the plethora of blond Stepford wives that read the news throughout the day on Fox and one of them is quoted as saying: “We got our jobs because we made Rupert Murdoch see how hard we work.” What if MSNBC re-edited that and broadcast her quote as “We got our jobs because we made Rupert Murdoch hard.”

While all of these examples would be hilarious, the fact is that doing this would be unethical and an affront to journalism. The problem is that no one at Fox News knows what the words “journalism” or “ethics” mean.