Television and the Growing Epidemic of Stupidity

Americans are among the most uninformed people on the face of the earth. We are surrounded by media of all sorts. We have access to newspapers,magazines, television, and the internet,and yet we are among the least educated people in the entire world. By the same token we also watch a disproportionate amount of television.

How bad is it? We sit in front of our television sets in the same way cavemen watched fires.
The average American spends between 5 and 6 hours watching TV. The only activities on which we spend more time are working and sleeping. That’s less time than we spend eating, with our spouses, or with our children. And the situation is even more abysmal where our children are concerned. Children under school age watch as much as eight hours of television a day. School age children watch a little less than eight hours a day. The average twenty-year-old has spent approximately two years watching television. At the same time reading and comprehension levels in every age group has plummeted. As a people we read less and comprehend less than we did ten years ago. In so far as writing is concerned, we are barely capable of stringing together a few simple sentences and that’s about it. As if that weren’t bad enough it appears as of the more television we watch the less we know about the vital issues of the day; and to make the situation even worse it doesn’t seem to matter what we watch. It can be Survivor, American Idol, news shows, the Simpsons, or Masterpiece Theater. The more television we watch the more stupid we become. (Interestingly enough there is some evidence to suggest that viewers of Fox News are even less informed than others.) And to make matters even worse, the trend does not appear to be improving. If anything we appear to be on a downward spiral with each successive generation watching more television but learning less and less. Indeed, the current generation is one of the first to know less than the generation before it.

Read more

Sphere: Related Content

My Newest Hero: Robert Reich

In his blog yesterday the former secretary of labor called out the mainstream media and the political establishment (read McCain and Billary spinmeisters) for criticizing Barak Obama’s recent remarks about the bitterness in the heartland.

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 61 years ago. My father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years later, I was secretary of labor of the United States, and I tried the best I could – which wasn’t nearly good enough – to help reverse one of the most troublesome trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-class wages and the expansion of povety. Male hourly wages began to drop in the early 1970s, adjusted for inflation. The average man in his 30s is earning less than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is far richer. Where did the money go? To the top.

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then — by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame “liberal elites,” to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones. The rest have merely “reported on” it. Instead of focusing on how to get Americans good jobs again; instead of admitting too many of our schools are failing and our kids are falling behind their contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China; instead of showing why we need a more progressive tax system to finance better schools and access to health care, and green technologies that might create new manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been mired in the old politics…

Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment – all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I sure don’t trust that McCain or Billary have the best interests of working Americans on their agenda.

It’s nice to see another former member of the Clinton administration demonstrate the character and backbone to stand up and be heard. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop… Billary lashing out at Professor Reich like they attacked Governor Richardson, another honorable man.

Cross posted from BFD Blog!

Sphere: Related Content

The American Media-Bought and paid for?

There was a time in our history when America’s so-called mainstream media kept us informed on important issues and events. We have to look no farther than the recent past, a little more than thirty years ago, to give them a few well-deserved kudos. I refer specifically to the Pentagon Papers and Nixon’s Waterloo that came to be known as Watergate. Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers was a global as well as national turning point in the Vietnam War. The investigative work of the Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward began the unraveling of Nixon’s White House. Both events transpired in the early 1970’s and ended with President Nixon’s resignation from office on August 9, 1974. Both of these watershed moments in our history could not have happened in this decade, I would bet my last devalued dollar on that.

Sunday morning, as I perused my emails, I focused on Salon’s Glen Greenwald’s piece entitled; The US establishment media in a nutshell. Glen has his panties in a wad about how little our MSM gives us on the Iraq War and how much baloney it does manage to slop we the hogs, with. With a simple NEXUS inquiry based on a 30 day news cycle, Mr. Greenwald provides us with the following big ticket items:

“Yoo and torture” - 102

 

“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73

 

“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16

 

“Obama and bowling” — 1,043

 

“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

 

“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607

 

“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

Read more

Sphere: Related Content

WHY IRAQ DISAPPEARED FROM THE CORPORATE MEDIA

WHY IRAQ DISAPPEARED FROM THE CORPORATE MEDIA

By PraetorOne

With 4000 Americans dead, sectarian violence on the rise in Iraq, and with the fragile truce with al-Sadr coming unraveled at the seams, our wonderful American media has shifted the focus away from the failing Surge in Iraq to domestic matters: The nonstop and all too irrelevant bitching between Senators Clinton and Obama, a message found in a bottle, and interests of personal interest such as the price of gas and the coming recession. Granted, the economy is an important issue, but will somebody please tell me what Obama and Clinton can possibly do or say that we haven’t heard already? Will someone please tell me what a message in a bottle has to do with anything?

Welcome to the glorious world of the right wing corporate media where self interest, fluff, and negativity take precedence over issues of substance.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting just a little sick and tired of distractions from important issues. Iraq is clearly more important than a message found in a bottle and it clearly deserves equal coverage along side the economy and the democratic primary process, and yet, in yet another attempt to cover up another sanguinary failure on the part of the Bush Administration it is treating the Obama-Clinton race (if it bleeds it leads) and the bottled message (another distraction) as if they are the equivalent of a relevant news story.

Read more

Sphere: Related Content