Sorry, but I’ve just got to say more about this.
These are the jidrools who place themselves on pedestals and look down on us peasants. They own us. they own our Deep State, our Not-so-deep State, our media, our schools and colleges and universities, and our business corporations. They speak, and we’re supposed to listen.
Is there any one of them who’s not a pervert?
This is our ruling class–heck, the whole world’s ruling class–and it’s garbage. Muck. They have cut themselves off from God and want to cut us off, too.
In between bouts of telling us what to do and what to believe, they do phone sex and masturbate. Jeffrey Toobin. We’re supposed to listen to him. He’s a sage, he’s a decider. He’s also a wanker, but never mind. Can’t keep his mind on his work, can he? But with such a superior mind, who are we, little nobodies, to point our fingers at him? We don’t get to go on TV and tell the country what to do. He does.
Look, if you want some jack-off artist to tell you what to think, go for it. You wonder why our country’s in the shape it’s in? Look who’s running it. Self-anointed liberal big shots. Slime of the earth.
And curiously enough, they all seem to work for the Democrat Party…
Pardon my cynicism, but if he had done it in drag in front of kids in a library, he would have been applauded instead of fired.
And as we used to say, if God lets this go on much longer, He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.
You got that right: double bullseye.
What I cannot understand is why people keep returning to these TV programs.
It reminds me of how they train elephants. A young elephant is tied up by the leg while it is still young and limited in strength. It can’t break the rope at that age and that lesson is imprinted upon its brain. For the rest of its life, that elephant can be restrained by using a rope which it could easily break, because it has learned that ropes can’t be broken. It’s not simply a matter of physical restraint, it’s a matter of psychological restraint. The animal is mentally tethered, not physically tethered.
Now, back to humans. We turn on the television and decide what to watch. Most “news” is not really news, but is designed to manipulate opinion. People forget that instead of bemoaning the quality and trustworthiness of news programming, they can simply turn it off. You don’t have to watch any news, whatsoever, or for that matter, any television whatsoever. You can turn it off, but like an elephant tethered with a rope it could easily break, many people watch the same garbage on TV, over and over, not realizing that they can break the tether. They think that an adult should watch the news, so they watch the news, even if it means watching someone like the subject of this post, publicly disgracing himself.
Many years ago, my television broke at a time I couldn’t afford to fix it. Metaphorically speaking, that broke the tether. I realized that instead of turning on the TV and looking for something worth watching, I could turn off the TV and not watch at all. Within weeks, I found that television annoyed me and I didn’t want to be around it. Much like an elephant looking in disgust at a puny, broken, tether that had restrained it to no real end, I looked at television as something that had stolen my attention for decades and had given me very little in return.
But here’s the catch, and it’s a big catch: while most people would admit that sitcoms, reality shows and melodramas are garbage, many of these same people are convinced that news is somehow different. It is perceived as responsible programming, but in reality, it plays by the very same rules as all other programming.
I read a book entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in 1985, which was about the role television played in our lives and comparing its effects to the fictitious pleasure-drug, Soma, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The author made the point that everything on television is entertainment. I saw this at work when Kennedy was assassinated. The networks turned to continuous coverage, from the time that the story broke, until the funeral had ended. Now, there was a lot of news that weekend and I was watching in real time when Oswald was shot, but most of what was televised that weekend was endless rehashing of a handful of facts. David Brinkley, in measured tones, obviously searching for something to say, marking time until they could find someone, anyone, to interview and then they’d cut to some reporter who did a remote interview of someone whose opinions were supposedly important.
This set the stage for news, as it is presented today. A talking head states something obvious, then cuts to a remote feed of a reporter that essentially affirms the obvious and there may be a heavily edited interview where it is obvious that the trimmed a response into a tiny sound bite which erased all context, but said precisely what the producer wanted to get across. So, at the bottom of it all, news programming is a every bit as controlled as any dramatic or comedic content. It is all entertainment. That is, if you find watching a commentator wanking to be entertaining.
Just for the record, Toobin wasn’t on a show being broadcast to an audience. It was a Zoom conference of several reporters discussing how they’d cover the next presidential debate. So the incident was “public” only in the sense that there were other people there, who saw it.
We need news, real news, and our country’s founders realized that: hence freedom of the press. What they weren’t able to anticipate was how the press would abuse that freedom.
The problem is, people consume news for the wrong reasons. When I was a child, TV network news had at least a degree of credibility, although it’s obvious that even some of the more august names in the industry were quite biased. But we do not have to patronize these news organizations.
CNN exists at all, because people tune in. I once attended a conference where, as part of the program, I heard something so stupid, so irresponsible, that I had to leave. I didn’t make a scene, I just got up and walked away quietly, never to return. I voted with my feet. If half the people in the room had left, the conference organizers would have realized that they had made a mistake. Now, that was long ago, but guess what? In the years since, a lot of people have voted with their feet and attendance at events sponsored by these people has dropped significantly … and it has hit the squarely in the wallet. The number of events they sponsor has dropped and attendance is down. I’ll indulge a little programming math here “attendance == revenue”. The same goes for viewership. == is shorthand for absolutely equals.
The only reason these news organizations exist is that they are still patronized to a level which makes it possible for them, and sorry, but I can’t resist this, it makes it possible for them to pay the wankers on their workforce. Quit patronizing these people and they will go away.
It’ll take a lot of time and effort to establish alternative news sources that are reliable and accurate. Meanwhile, people settle for crapola.
It’s easier than ever to find accurate news, but it requires personal responsibility. Researching news on the Internet allows us to see multiple accounts of the same story. With a little effort, the truth can be found.
I don’t have a television. I threw out my last TV set in 1998 when I realized I hadn’t turned it on since 1991.
Very similar to my experience. I live in the countryside and there’s no cable. For a while after I moved here, I had satellite TV, then I did the math and realized I was paying roughly $50 per month for something I watched, perhaps, an hour every month. I was paying almost a dollar per minute for what I was actually using.
Now, I do have a TV set and watch DVD documentaries, some old movies and a handful of interesting YouTube clips, but that’s it.
I actually got a portable DVD player (the size of a laptop) for playing operas and old movies.