Press undermining their own product with spin

It looks like it’s back to the bad old days of Italian politics, where all the characters seem to come from Central Casting, and governments stood for a few months at a time. Chaos, it seems is still entertaining. Were it not for advanced age and memory, no-one would realize that by reading the news. In fact the absence of another comparative in political affairs is waiting in the wings for the press to form an opinion. Served better by an even shorter public memory – the yawning gap between the treatment of Al Gore’s loss with the recent Italian election.

I still wonder if Spiegel, Stern, Le Monde, Libération and the rest of the ‘braintrust’ will lose their dookie as they did over what was actually Al Gore’s attempt to steal the 2000 US election by getting shadowy extremists to stuff ballot boxes and having people examining “hanging chads” as if some holes punched in a piece of paper are more noble than others? What? They only found fault in the parties with one sort of political view? How could that be?

The vision is uncritical, selective, and leaves enough information out to eventually make a pasivated consumer of news ignorant.

Much as the predictably biased BBC is promoting a forthcoming uncritical documentary about Ollanta Humala, calling him as others have: a “nationalist,” suddenly has nothing bad to say about national exceptionalism as long as it’s red, or the fact that multilateralism is way-laid by it. Certain military men in politics are also suddenly immune to scrutiny as well.

Bilateralism in relations, apparently are suddenly quite okay when it’s with Fidel or Chavez. Improbably, in a near non-sequitur BBC Radio is pimping the damn thing, calling it “marching to a new beat” or a “new global economy” or somesuch, drooling all over the great unknown element in Peru which they hope will start singing the Internationale for them.

I’m sure they’ll bring it to air as soon as they can find an opinion to prop it up with.

By it’s very nature a nutty little cartel of Marxists is isolationist if anything, and it damn well not be something you cal call "global", because, you know, most of us, including the Chinese, might not like it. What then would an ‘anti-globalized’ united world do other than disband itself, anyway?

Does the selectiveness of investigation such as we see with the BBC suggest that we might have a choice? More than anything what is evident is the naïvité and lack of professionalism evident in that form of activist-journalism. It’s hatred of people’s ability to make choices that they wouldn’t make for themselves is evident, as is their ignorance of the complexity of the world.