The more you put in a brain, the more
it holds. But you can't run a deficit: you actually need stuff to put
in.
Most of the time people complaining
about “mainstream media” aren't actually helping. They want
journalism to stop being journalism, and instead confirm their
existing world-view.
They're not actually complaining about
“factual reporting”. They want a political position that agrees
with theirs, and if they don't get it, they won't buy.
You idiots: all you're doing is forcing
a polarisation that makes the actual newspapers worse, not better.
You – both sides, left and right – are forcing an exclusion of
the middle where most people actually live.
Look, you idiots: sometimes, facts
can't be massaged into a political slant. Insisting that they do so
is just as stupid as editors that try to do so – editors who are as
easily led by the nose as asses are (but the nose-ring of the modern
editor is some focus group of poor schmucks answering questionnaires
in exchange for a cheese platter).
So. You're going to endorse a story
because it was written in a style you enjoyed, took a position you
enjoyed, slagged the right political victims, took the right
position?
Really, you're an idiot. A solipsistic
brain donor. Instead of wanting to know more about your world, you
want to know less; you don't want information, but confirmation.
You are undermining not only the media
– by encouraging their own solipsistic lock-up into
arsehole-gazing, but by encouraging them to confirm your own –
you're undermining democracy, by elevating Vaudeville over substance,
sizzle over steak.
Sparkle is fun, but it isn't
illumination.
And the stupid folly of it all is that
you think that Social Media is replacing MSM when most of what it's
doing is re-Tweeting MSM with the gimcrack endorsements of the worst
crap MSM has to offer.
Frankly, you dills, the reason MSM has
become a parody is because you endorse the parody – but only from
the intellectually-crippled frame that interprets the journalist's
job as endorsing your own shorthand politics.
If “bitchy to the other side” is a
reason to endorse untruths, you aren't thinking. You're just
knee-jerking to the idea that either Julia Gillard is Juliar or that
Tony Abbot is PhoneyTony. That's slogan, you fools, and it doesn't
help you.
If you endorse the offhand, one-handed
ejaculations of a post-lunch editor as gold, and dismiss factual
reporting as politicised, you're worse than a fool: you are engaging
in the destruction not just of media, but of debate and democracy.
And I have no truck with you, left or right.
