YES, WORDS DO HAVE IMPACT AND INFLUENCE

Listening to legislators on the Right calling Obama a Socialist certainly points to their own ignorance, but it also gets to be believed by many when they hear it over and over again. The worst of them were elected and must be endured until the next election cycle.  Not so with those on media.  They have contracts.  I do not watch Fox News because of the hateful rhetoric and lies.  I looked forward to Keith Olbermann because, while he didn't mince words on his opinion...it was clear when he gave opinions but I was not aware that anyone ever accused him of lying.  If Olbermann was 'freed of his contract' because of his Liberal stance, MSNBC is ignorant of the importance his thinking is to so many of us.  Their popularity will fade as someone as forceful as Coombs will no doubt replace him.

We will be left with Chris Matthews who never lets his interviewees finish a thought as they attempt to answer his questions.  Ed Schultz is good, as is Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell. However, it seems the bosses want to have a B-flat media outlet.  It will cater to a B-flat audience.  I can only hope that people out there will have recognized the talent MSNBC had and tossed aside.  It will be like finding a treasure at a yard sale.Shame on MSNBC executives.  They are as knowledgeable about their viewers as Republicans are about the wishes of the 'American people'.

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE LAST WORD

Tonight Lawrence O'Donnell, on his MSNBC show, invited the leaders of five separate groups of the Teapartiers. None claimed leadership roles.  Each said that the Teaparty does not  need leaders, that as a leaderless group they have done very well.  They believe their goals are consistent with one another. They all said they wished for smaller, less intrusive government, and less socialism yet none could readily name a socialist program they would cut.  They all agreed, finally, that subsidies were socialistic but did not readily consider health care and social security as such.  For this observer, it was difficult to muster respect and comfort that these people knew enough to lead the country in a productive direction.

These group leaders were a contrast to the people the media has focused on as representative of the Teaparty's chosen candidates for office.  This group did not sound fanatical, rather confused, naive, and somewhat like a small child who, without any real knowledge,  thinks they can simply solve a problem...no hint of sequelae to their actions.

The questions asked by the interviewers. is often as useless as asking, :"What would Jesus do?"  This was not at all what O'Donnell did   It was a show run by a real pro.  He kept his focus and disallowed their spewing rhetoric instead of direct answers to what he asked of them.  Following Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann,
Rachel Maddow, his show, The Last Word, is aptly named.  Welcome to our world which is ready to be brought some reality, truth, balance, and integrity.

POLITICAL TIMING IS EVERYTHING

It seems more people are interested in Lindsay Lohan being sent back to jail than the state of poverty in our nation.  With exquisite pain finally flooding him, just before elections, a justice department lawyer just had to blow the whistle though he has been confronted with this pain for years...coincidence that he finally decided to be a protected whistle blower?  Oddly, while I heard this today on Fox News, I can find nothing on it anywhere online.

Glenn Beck believes that the violence at Teapartiers meetings is coming from the left though all evidence suggests the opposite.  It is not indicated that many liberals attend Tea Party events.


On Ed Shultz (MSNBC) his poll revealed that an overwhelming per cent of responders believe that Glenn Beck and Chris Christie (the Bully, as he is known to most) are splitting the country/
Christie and splitting the country.

The Democrats are finally letting the public know more about what they have accomplished and what their goals are, as well as how they hope to implement action to achieve them.

THE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH!

Writing on the blog AS TIME GOES BY, Saul Friedman quotes: "In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt called these reporters “muckrakers,” but while he criticized them he also said, “I hail as a benefactor...every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in book, magazine or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in turn remembers that that attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.”"


In 1906 the world was not full of people in your face on a TV screen who were known to be untruthful yet permitted to go on daily to spew their falsehoods and vicious attacks as though their opinions and lies deserve merit.
The Society of Professional Journalists has a Code of Ethics. To read it in entirety, click here.

Surprising only to some of the professional journalists who seem not to know it exists or choose not to follow it. Ignoring it seems to have few, if any, negative consequences though it has existed since 1909. Some of the major points (and you will recognize those that have been forgotten by those who run the TV news media today, especially) are: 1. Seek truth and report it. 2. Minimize harm. 3. Act independently. 4. Be accountable.

Since Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. seem to be the major network news channels, it is no wonder that most of us who watch them wonder where Hannity, Beck, O'Reilly, and so many others occasionally less flagrant in their abuse of the the code, can face the camera and say the things they say. Understanding that Beck, Limbaugh (though he insists that he is only an entertainer though he is not entertaining but self-propelled in his vitriol spewing) were admires of and mentored by Bob Grant.

Perhaps viewers will weigh some of the faces on news TV against those four points in the code of ethics. If you convince yourself that the person you are watching does not adhere to the code, will you continue support by watching? Glenn Beck took it a bit over the top with his inaccurate and insensitive remarks so that as viewership began to fall and sponsors began to leave, his future on the network began to weaken.
After all, the power is in the viewer ratings and what advertising they can pull in. However, as long as viewers like (or don't realize they are) being lied to, brainwashed, and consciously fed misinformation...those personalities will continue to shine.

SOME PUNDITS DON'T LEARN OR BEND

The other night I watched MSNBC. Mike Barnicle was subbing for Chris Matthews on Hardball. He asked a question of Pat Buchanan and Lawrence O'Donnell, both of whom were raised as Catholics and are products of parochial school education. The question was, "Should Notre Dame have asked Obama, who supports abortion rights and stem cell research, to speak at this year's commencement?", which they have apparently done.

Buchanan was against it and said that, though he is a friend of the man who made the decision, he thinks the decision was a violation of that for principles for which the religious school. He kept raising the opinions of the Pope as the deciding and acceptable factor in determining the values and opinions of the speakers. Boston College is a Catholic school but I have never heard that sort of discrimination about its students or speakers. Brandeis, primarily of Jewish faith, also shows no discrimination in accepting students or choosing speakers and professors. Years ago, when I attended graduate school at Boston University, some of my classes were assigned to be held in the School of Theology. I recall a sign on a wall that said "If God had wanted you to smoke, he would have provided you with a chimney." It amused me because one could have written "God must have wanted you to smoke because he provided you with cigarettes and a nose." To this day I cannot tell you what denomination the School of Theology is at BU, though I seem to recall it to have been some Protestant denomination.

I've never been a fan of Pat Buchanan because I have found him to be too tied to his past, with rigidity. In fact, he seems totally out of touch with all the Catholics I know, most of whom believe in the right of others to abortion, believe in and practice birth control, and most believe that science should be outside church regulations.

The argument against Obama was raised and O'Donnell countered that the Pope was equally against capital punishment but GW Bush, the governor with the most executions. had been a speaker at Notre Dame. While O'Donnell was recognizing and accusing Buchanan of hypocrisy, Buchanan could not admit to it. He kept insisting that all who were put to death were GUILTY of murder. He completed misses one of the main arguments that many against capital punishment make...that too many innocent people are put to death and only later found they are victims of the judicial system, political pressure and greed, inaccuracy of witnesses, sloppy lab work or other reasons.

It seems evident that the managers of news stations do not care what positions their staff and honored guests take, just as long as it pretends to offer a fair and balanced presentation by the channel. If intelligence, knowledge and truth were important to them, they would present those rather than the rigid, bizarre, distorted thinking that many of the ones on staff and as guests present the viewers.

SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR

While the pundits are trying to analyze every movement, sigh, tear, loss of patience, word, look, clothing, hairdos, and anything else they might spot, it might serve them well to remember that even Freud, famous for analyzing all sorts of things and drawing sexual conclusions, said (perhaps with reference to his own penchant for smoking cigars), "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." It means that sometimes you don't have to search deeply for hidden or unconscious meanings, and you should just take things at face value.

However, face value doesn't sell ads on TV. Since adversarial politics make it more interesting for the endless hours TV journalist/entertainers must probe and comment on what they are dissecting about some insignificant comment, or any other benign sign, they must manufacturer something to debate amongst themselves since the politicians failed their task of playing their 'adversarial' positions by the rules of current journalism. For some reason the producers think it makes for better show to pair opposing views. Hannity and Coombes were supposed to represent this, for a fair and balanced Fox News. It failed because they paired a tiger with a mouse, hardly fair and balanced.

It would seem that MSNBC has a somewhat different view of things. They let their powerhouses work alone. Not only does Keith Olbermann carry his own show but actually analyzes what is going in in the country. Something that he is doing must be reaching a lot of people favorably because his open letters to Bush are a real hit on YouTube. He seems to be the only one with views which he dares to express while others pander to their own Gods and biases.

A TRIP DOWN MEET THE PRESS MEMORY LANE

The longer I live, the more I observe world crises, environmental disasters, reflections of man's inhumanity to man, losses, evil in the world, and so much more sorry stuff. Many people have contributed to good, and many to evil. Meet the Press recently celebrated it's 60th anniversary with pictures that raise one's memory of people who came to power before today. Look for the slide show under the Caption of Meet the Press. By viewing the pictures you can watch the lucky ones age. Less lucky, gone through attrition and old age, assassinated or other reasons are seen as they were then Time stands still for John and Robert Kennedy and some others, Indira Ghandi being one of them. Others have grown old before our eyes.

There was a time when corporate owners had a hands-off policy in directing the news. That seems to be lost today when our media has become a free-for-all, biased voice, pushing its own self-serving agendas, politics and candidates. It is reported that "the news channels play different roles within their respective companies that are useful to note in trying to imagine how they might evolve in the future. Fox News is one of the stars of News Corp.'s TV portfolio. CNN is a solid performer for Time Warner, but not an enormous factor. MSNBC, by contrast, contributes little financially to either of its parents, General Electric (the NBC of MSNBC) or Microsoft (the MS). On the one hand, that might suggest MSNBC is in a precarious position, which has led to speculation about its owners' commitment to the channel in the long term. On the other, having multiple platforms to deliver news and other content may be central to both companies' strategies." You can get a more complete report here.