Today on PBS I heard someone interviewing Sam Donaldson. He confessed that he is saddened by the attrition of newspapers in print because he read them and made up his program from the information he got from them. The disillusionment I felt was massive. He chuckled as he said that they let the AP do the work of digging up the stories and facts and just culled out what they wanted to use, many years ago to date, and mentioned Nixon's era.
I'm not sure that I wasn't more shocked to realize that he was sad to see newsprint less available and that good source leaving us. Did the man not ever use the Internet? Did he never chase down information from many sources to try to find the truth? If anyone has ever been involved with a newspaper story in which they had been an eyewitness or have someone writing about them, they cannot understand the distortions that get printed. Reporters lie frequently to get a story. Today I think the first source to print something is eagerly picked up by everyone else and like the 'parlor game' it spreads through the system that is supposed to be enlightening the public as to what is really happening in the world.
While I struggled with absorbing that bit of information from Sam Donaldson, which certainly explained much of my current disappointment with the network news as well as the printed news, (I won't even mention Time, Newsweek, and those magazines that are frequently outdated by the time they get into print and reach the reader). Something within me feels that my time has been wasted when the 'news' I am reading has already been publicly retracted, replaced with new facts or action, and is too recent to even take its place as history value.
Listening further, I heard an afternoon show in which a caller phoned in to say that he was upset that the government asked the CEO of GM to step down but the government had not asked the AIG CEOs to do the same. That the caller was ignorant of facts was less surprising than that the show moderator agreed. Did either of them listen to Liddy being grilled by the incompetents in the Congress? He just came on board to take the place of the CEO who had left. Cassano in London, the man probably most responsible for the sub-prime fiasco (really wanted to say 'fubar', but I figured lots of people would be too lazy to Google the meaning) had left more than a year ago. Many AIG top brass saw the handwriting on the wall and all too many of the culprits jumped ship early so that there was no necessity for the government to ask them to resign. Does no one wonder that the CEO would consider retaining bonus to keep a few people who know what they did there and what to do to wind things down?
It is amusing and annoying to hear so many people see the employees who have remained at AIGFP as interchangeable with any able bodied people trained in a similar job function elsewhere. It ignores the learning curve it would take for someone to step in and know what to do to shut down a facility that requires another year, at minimum, to wind down all its activities, and that is with people who know exactly what they are doing. Would someone like to double that time while the trainee or experienced-but-new-on-the-job takes that year to learn what they are supposed to be doing. It is learning about the work of the company and its demands that takes time. Lots of people know computers...it is what you do on them to satisfy the employees, the accountants, the tax people, and (in the future) the regulators. That takes time to learn in a company. Even trash collectors have to learn a route and how to separate recyclables from regular trash, and what toxic products not to accept. While that learning curve may be shorter, you would not send an untrained worker out on the job without some training. Go up the food chain and the training takes longer.
Perhaps having trained myself for more than 50 years not to rush to judgment about people in my work as a therapist, I expect others to refrain from passing judgment before they know what they are talking about. Alas, it will never be so. Bush was able to get enough followers to start the war in Iraq by appealing to their impulse to violence as a solution, confident that we had the greater military strength....and look where that got us!
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