Media Cycles

[longknife]

Maybe I'm wrong, but noticing the current emphasis on news by various sources, I seem to see something. We are entering the primary election cycle – and suddenly there are all sorts of other things to report on beside politics.

CNN New Day is spending most of its airtime with the disappearance of the Malaysian airplane and giving very little, if any, coverage of Obamacare.

Syria is no longer in the headlines – and Assad's forces, receiving supplies from Russia, is retaking land and the rebels are being pushed back. It appears those forces being supported by Iran and the Saudis aren't doing so well. Kurds in Syria seem to be looking to get closer with Iraqi Kurds and Assad seems to be going along with it. Why not? There are tens of thousands of his people in refugee camps in the Kurdish area of Turkey.

When not dealing with the airliner, we're being inundated with Crimea and all the saber-rattling there. All sorts of suppositions about what land grab Putin is going to make next.

A Republican wins in a traditional Republican area and, beside claiming low voter turnout as the reason, little more is said. Oops! Forgot the continual attacks against the Tea Party that really isn't a political party.

Meanwhile, Venezuela is in turmoil and Cuba has sent troops to help the socialist government control its own people. An ex-Sandanista terrorist leader is elected the new president of Nicaragua. Brazil, trying to prepare for this Summer's World Cup, is experiencing disturbances and problems getting the venues ready – as well as having severe drought in areas that produce most of the Brazil's food. Several other South and Central American countries are having problems.

And the media continues to pay attention to our neighbors to the south. Not even vigilantes in Mexico fighting US-supported Drug Cartels but also their own Federales.

Oh yeah, and let's not forget the minimal coverage of the messed up Obamacare websites, the millions spent to try to get people to sign up, and the total lack of believable results in getting the national farce underway.

Anybody beside me notice all of this?

 

[Machaut]

Yes, absolutely. Do you remember when Obama released his birth certificate? Almost immediately people started saying it was a fake, and then videos started circulating where people opened up the document in various programs and proved that it had been edited in a major way on a modern computer. Within a week of the birth certificate drop, all birth certificate coverage ceased and was replaced with "durrr bin Laden dead, no proof but w/e lolz". Not even Fox News touched on the birth certificate thing ever again, nor was there any rigorous analysis of the claim that bin Laden was dead.

A lot of people also noticed that, prior to the beginning of the presidential primaries in 2012, Ron Paul was completely ignored. However, once he started gaining in the pre-election polls, suddenly he was the new hot topic--or rather, his "horrible evil racism" was.

The Libyan coup was marketed from day one as a home-brewed domestic rebellion of democracy-loving freedom fighters, yet when it comes out that UH-OH, THE REBELS ARE AL-QAEDA AFTER ALL JUST LIKE GADDAFI SAID, suddenly Libya isn't as interesting as Justin Bieber et al. And do you remember in the course of the media's coverage that they claimed on three separate occasions that Gaddafi's son Khamis had died or been captured something like three or four times? Not rerunning the same story, but making those claims weeks apart, usually without acknowledging their shenanigans from before. Most of the Gaddafi family must've died multiple times each, according to the mass media outlets that never ran a retraction.

It may just be because we watch different news shows, but I've been seeing a decent amount of Obamacare coverage on Faux News. However, it's the same "Nobody's enrolling" and "Can you believe how they're trying to advertise it THIS time?" stories again and again.

It seems to me that probably about 85% of all "news" coverage is on Crimea or the airplane, with the rest coming from celebrity gossip and actual news stories in roughly equal proportion.

Have you noticed that a lot of real news stories only ever get covered by any given network once? Not the Kardashian garbage, not Crimea, but real news that people should be hearing about all day, they say it once and drop it completely. No follow-ups, no repetitions on the morning and evening news, just once.

It calls to mind the Ben Franklin quote: "A Republic, if you can keep it." It's as if the string-pullers in the media are giving us chance after chance to reject the Brave New World-esque news and focus on the substantive pieces, and the vast majority of us fail every time, with the few who do pay attention also failing to effectively alert the idiotic masses to these stories.