The
News Media is Thriving These Days, But…
The
news media is thriving these days, alive and well with its many commercials,
political propaganda, gossip, sports, and, relatively speaking, minor news
events—and, oh yes, commercials. From our very beginning, “Freedom of the Press”
has been a major contribution to the safety, welfare, and protection of the
people from the errors and sins of government, but real in-depth reporting is
slowly disappearing from the scene. Daily news events are reported over and
over, sometimes for days, while other important subjects are overlooked. We are majoring in minors and minoring in majors.
For example, where,
today, are the pros and cons of single payer healthcare being discussed?
Certainly this subject is being discussed superfluously, but where are the
in-depth pro and con discussions? Most of what I hear about the subject is, to
the effect, “No need to discuss this as it will never be approved anyway”. Oh
well, healthcare is only 17.5 percent of our spending nationally, annually
contributing to our national deficit and debt. No problem.
The financial crisis of
2008 was triggered by derivatives, one of those new securities invented to
allegedly provide insurance coverage to home mortgage holders, aka fish food
for speculators in the financial markets. I don’t really know how many dollars
worth of these securities were in circulation in 2008. I have heard numbers
like $400 Trillion. I have also heard numbers amounting to $900 Trillion. What
are the numbers now, and when is our illustrious media going to reveal them to
the people. The last time I heard anything in the mass media about the
derivative risk was an article by Peter Cohan, AOL.COM, Big Risk: $1.2
Quadrillion Derivatives Market Dwarfs World GDP. Folks! Do you know how much
money $1.2 Quadrillion is? Let me tell you. It is
$1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 or 1,000 times $1 Trillion. My gosh,
folks, the world’s annual gross
domestic product is only $50 to $60 trillion, and this article was written June
9, 2010—over six years ago. Oh well, that wasn’t important either. The public
wouldn’t understand anyway.
Let’s
really get basic. It’s common knowledge that education in government, and civics
has been lacking in our school systems in recent years. Yet our government from
the president on down and the news media, when they address the people, they
refer to members of the House of Representatives as Congressmen (or women).
They are not Congressmen. Their titles are Representatives. If they are a
Congressman, so also is a Senator by gum and by golly. Congress is the name
given to our national legislature, a bicameral body made up of the House of
Representatives, the lower house, and the Senate, the upper house. To be a
Congressman, one would have to be both a Representative and a Senator at the
same time. Duh… By the way, do you want to know why we have two houses? In
short, the answer is the lower house, the House of Representatives represent
the majority of the people, the masses who elect them. There are 435 members.
The Senate, the upper house, represents the minority elite among us, in theory
at least. There are 100 of them. I say elite. In our nation’s beginning,
Senators were elected by the House of Representatives. Only later in the course
of our history were they elected by the people as they now are. For further
information:
To close
for now, our news media exists for the purpose of serving our people. They have
to earn income to pay their bills, i.e. salaries, insurance, rent, and return
on investments to their investors, but their main purpose, their only purpose
which, in the end, justifies their very existence is to serve the people with
news which is the truth; and, in my view, they could do a much better job.
This
is my view. What’s yours?
In
the meantime, this Ronald Miller, http://sageobserver.blogspot.com/
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