A friend of mine on Facebook recently expressed the understandable (and laudable) frustration about the level of media oxygen consumed by bad-girl/bad-boy celebrity train-wrecks like Lindsay Lohan while brave men and women (gay and straight alike, while we're on the subject) die unheralded. She went on to wonder aloud what's wrong with our country. However deserving of scorn Lohan or (fill in embarrassing celebrity here) may be, I can't help but feel they're much too simplistic a target. Put another way, ranting against them serves the same purpose as the media's unsavory focus on them and other malcontents like would-be book-burners - distracting us from issues of actual substance.
As far as what's wrong with our country, while I didn't come here to bury the government, there's no doubt that it plays a large part though for reasons beyond the obvious. Starting with Bush 43 & perpetuated by Obama, rather than pushing Americans to face the hard truths of being at war, with the sacrifices that should entail, our government almost goes out of its way to disguise this national condition.
That's not to say this surprises me. The wars were funded outside the budget for years, enabling both major parties to dodge hard choices while the deficit expanded. Meanwhile, cowards on both sides of the aisle in congress fell victim to the fallacy that allowing a tax cut that was ill-advised in the first place to expire is the same thing as raising taxes at a time when the need to get our fiscal house in order is greatest. In short, we have a government fit only for cowards.
Not to shift blame away from the government, but I'd have to say that the media is culpable in this as well. If the media had held people's feet to the fire by practicing actual journalism (and a vital role in this is questioning those in power regardless of party or ideology), then we'd have more accountability. If the Post hadn't published Woodward and Bernstein, or had relegated their reporting to a three paragraph story on page A7 loaded with "but Democrats have done bad things too" to provide a phony sense of balance, then would we have had the Watergate hearings? I'd say no.
ReplyDeleteWe not only need to have a government that is willing to tell the hard truths, we need to have a media that is willing to ask the hard questions when the truth isn't being provided. Thanks to a 24-hour news cycle that promotes *everything* as being equivalent (such as stories that once never got reported outside of local news, hence "Missing White Woman syndrome") and hypes the most salacious or fear-mongering stories in order to pull in viewers (and thereby deliver value to commercial sponsors), we're seeing a government fit only for cowards being questioned by a media populated by cowards who focus on keeping the populace cowering in fear.