![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
NPR can't brain today...
Jul. 25th, 2005 10:40 amHAS EVERYONE GONE COMPLETELY INSANE?!
NPR has apparently started catching the dumb. The host of the show on right now just introduced lizards and snakes as examples of invertebrates - I mean, for the love of god, snakes are almost nothing but spine - and yesterday, the host of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me interchangeably used "galaxy" and "constellation" when he meant "solar system." It was like listening to fucking Lost in Space Theatre. It's not funny when it's supposed to be news.
I mean, I thought at this point that reasonably educated people had caught up on that last one, in particular. It's such a classic piece of what the fuck is wrong with you? randomness that I thought anybody stuck in front of a national broadcast microphone - particularly on a news-based show on NPR - might get it right. Clearly, however, I was wrong.
It bothers me. It really does.
It's not just the small things, if you can consider getting matters of scale off by several orders of magnitude to be a small thing. People need to be getting smarter, and they aren't. I'm not convinced they're getting dumber; that's easy to imagine, but not very likely to be true. The large-scale education of Americans has never been managed well; the American system produces a sizable minourity of reasonably to very well educated people, and a majority of asshats who we hope don't hurt themselves too much with screwdrivers. Historically, that's been good enough.
But the gap between what is needed and what is present is growing, and that gap is both more visible and is hurting the country. The failure to create the educated population needed to be the body politic in a highly-competitive large-market high-individual-power-ratio world is, I think, a big part of the upsurge in nonsensical crap like dominionism, Islamicism, reconstructionism - fundamentalisms of all sort, really - and the various corruptors against rationalism and civil society that they all engender. That stress - the stress of not having the tools needed to understand the world around you - has to come out somewhere, and in a lot of cases, it's coming out as fundamentalism, probably because of the simpler, reduced world it lets you create around you.
And at the same time, there's a penumbra of failed due diligence in areas of fact. I don't know why. I've worked media (professional news radio while in school; not school papers) and I know crap gets through that wouldn't have before. Certainly I think that the drift change in political coverage to coverage of political spin as newsworthy in and of itself has to be part of it; when the PR flak's spew is the news and the news itself isn't, I don't see how that can't have a corrupting influence upon the rest. The very idea that there's such a thing as "spin alley" and that people who are basically standing there in it and saying, "Hi, I'm here to say things even I don't believe1 to benefit my candidate and I expect you to report it," and that this works, kind of breaks my head. "Hi, I'm lying! Quote me as truth!" "Okay!"
Seriously, what the fuck? Sure, people figure out what's going on, but what good does that do if they don't have the tools to know how to figure out what isn't a lie? What good does that do if they don't even know where to start, like they overwhelmingly don't with science and technology?
When most analysis sources are corrupt, but to varying degrees, how do you learn to tell them apart when you have no capacity to analyse the underlying data?
And how do you run a competitive society that way?
Sunday's miles: 2.0
Miles out of Hobbiton: 297.05
Miles to Rivendell: 161.25
----
1: Such as Senator Rick Santorum's communications director. He's an openly gay man working for one of the most actively homophobic senators in the country; he's a gay man working for someone who believes gay men should be illegal. Has the whole country gone deeply dissociative, in a bad way? How can this possibly be credible? How can you think that the "Jews for Hitler" representative is, you know, not insane? And yet, there he is, yakking away... while reporters take notes. Doesn't anybody else think that's deeply broken?
Today's Flower
Blue star creeper, in the front garden
( Quizzes and stuff )
NPR has apparently started catching the dumb. The host of the show on right now just introduced lizards and snakes as examples of invertebrates - I mean, for the love of god, snakes are almost nothing but spine - and yesterday, the host of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me interchangeably used "galaxy" and "constellation" when he meant "solar system." It was like listening to fucking Lost in Space Theatre. It's not funny when it's supposed to be news.
I mean, I thought at this point that reasonably educated people had caught up on that last one, in particular. It's such a classic piece of what the fuck is wrong with you? randomness that I thought anybody stuck in front of a national broadcast microphone - particularly on a news-based show on NPR - might get it right. Clearly, however, I was wrong.
It bothers me. It really does.
It's not just the small things, if you can consider getting matters of scale off by several orders of magnitude to be a small thing. People need to be getting smarter, and they aren't. I'm not convinced they're getting dumber; that's easy to imagine, but not very likely to be true. The large-scale education of Americans has never been managed well; the American system produces a sizable minourity of reasonably to very well educated people, and a majority of asshats who we hope don't hurt themselves too much with screwdrivers. Historically, that's been good enough.
But the gap between what is needed and what is present is growing, and that gap is both more visible and is hurting the country. The failure to create the educated population needed to be the body politic in a highly-competitive large-market high-individual-power-ratio world is, I think, a big part of the upsurge in nonsensical crap like dominionism, Islamicism, reconstructionism - fundamentalisms of all sort, really - and the various corruptors against rationalism and civil society that they all engender. That stress - the stress of not having the tools needed to understand the world around you - has to come out somewhere, and in a lot of cases, it's coming out as fundamentalism, probably because of the simpler, reduced world it lets you create around you.
And at the same time, there's a penumbra of failed due diligence in areas of fact. I don't know why. I've worked media (professional news radio while in school; not school papers) and I know crap gets through that wouldn't have before. Certainly I think that the drift change in political coverage to coverage of political spin as newsworthy in and of itself has to be part of it; when the PR flak's spew is the news and the news itself isn't, I don't see how that can't have a corrupting influence upon the rest. The very idea that there's such a thing as "spin alley" and that people who are basically standing there in it and saying, "Hi, I'm here to say things even I don't believe1 to benefit my candidate and I expect you to report it," and that this works, kind of breaks my head. "Hi, I'm lying! Quote me as truth!" "Okay!"
Seriously, what the fuck? Sure, people figure out what's going on, but what good does that do if they don't have the tools to know how to figure out what isn't a lie? What good does that do if they don't even know where to start, like they overwhelmingly don't with science and technology?
When most analysis sources are corrupt, but to varying degrees, how do you learn to tell them apart when you have no capacity to analyse the underlying data?
And how do you run a competitive society that way?
Sunday's miles: 2.0
Miles out of Hobbiton: 297.05
Miles to Rivendell: 161.25
----
1: Such as Senator Rick Santorum's communications director. He's an openly gay man working for one of the most actively homophobic senators in the country; he's a gay man working for someone who believes gay men should be illegal. Has the whole country gone deeply dissociative, in a bad way? How can this possibly be credible? How can you think that the "Jews for Hitler" representative is, you know, not insane? And yet, there he is, yakking away... while reporters take notes. Doesn't anybody else think that's deeply broken?
Blue star creeper, in the front garden
( Quizzes and stuff )
