By Special Guest Contributor Stephanie Stebbins!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Why Good Journalism Is Important

There is a disturbing trend I have watched develop over the last decade or so.

Yellow Journalism seems to be taking over more and more respectable news sources.

Now, before anyone forgets, Faux News, I mean, Fox News, has never been even close to a semblance of a credible news source.

I mean, come on. One of their own spokesmen ADMITTED that they use propaganda on a consistent and constant basis.

Now that we have that out of the way, I would like to talk to YOU,CNN.

Yellow Journalism, as I learned it, is the use of attention-grabbing headlines in order to draw in readers or the practice of presenting opinion as fact.

Now, more than ever, we are bombarded with a never-ending stream of information. Whether it is the internet, cable news, or the slowly dying print media, if you want to find out about what is going on in the world, it is literally less than a click away.

The information junkie part of myself is in love with this fact, but the cynical side of me often wonders just how reliable these sources are that the information is coming from.

Really? A helium balloon can carry a six year old child? How stupid do you think we are? Do you mean to tell me you are seriously going to cover this ALL DAY when it takes 4 SECONDS for it to register in your brain that this is physically impossible??? Wow. Faaaaaaantastic.

You see, I don't know if it is because I am the daughter of a former Washington Post reporter and Virginian-Pilot editor or maybe I just have common sense, but more and more I am noticing a lot more opinion seeping in and less and less facts.

And, it bothers me.

It bothers me, immensely.

I see it as a personal responsibility as a journalist, no matter what "type" of journalist you are, to present the facts as they are and NOT what you think of said facts.

I understand that as a writer, you are allotted your own voice and must use it, BUT I draw the line when journalists delve into opinion territory while reporting facts.

Call me silly, but isn't that an editorial and not a report?

I truly believe that especially now we, the American people, DESERVE to be given facts.

Just the facts.

I don't know about you, but if you give me the facts, I can pretty much ascertain my OWN opinion from it, without the help of any "talking head."

And, I truly believe that the rest of us are perfectly capable of doing that, as well.

So, this is my open letter to you, Journalists of America. It is time to bring TRUE fact reporting back.

Walter Cronkite would be pleased.

Your thoughts?

The Joe Lane classic: "On Style"

I just wanted to post a Joe Lane classic with some of the original comments; "On Style". It always seems to help "beat away the basterd" when the ink flows slowly. And Joe, you can feel free to take this down in 10 minutes if ya want I just wanted to have it on the sidebar menu for all to stumble back across. RE-Enjoy, everyone!

So I drank a full pot of coffee, things began to rumble, things were shaking down south. Off I whisked to the bathroom, my den of silence, the place where I get most of my best reading and for that matter thinking done.

What am I reading right now? I am reading Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahnuik. Truth be told I am not sure I like it. It's not the content, his premise is solid. It is a story about the fashion industry: super models, trannies, flashing cameras, oh my. No, I am digging the plot. It's his style. I am finding the whole damn thing too gimmicky. He is trying too hard, too many tricks. I wish he'd tell the story, I am already dizzy and I have read only 20 pages. So there, no offense Mr. Palahnuik, you're brilliant, I am a huge fan. It's just that the first 20 pages of Invisible Monsters had me reaching for the Gravol. Maybe that's the point. But what is my point? Is this a book review? Heavens no, this is a rant about style.

Style versus substance. I used to write raw, I abhorred the shackles of grammar and structure. I thought them false constraint; I believed my mind and my words were too wild to be caged. Blame Kerouac and his beats. Then thank them for the inspiration. I eventually began to blog, which meant that my words were being 'published' with the potential for all to read. The perfectionism sunk in. I was now playing a writer on the Internet. I had better buck up, edit, edit, spell check, worry. I took it one step further. I enrolled in journalism classes. British journalism classes at that. I wanted my words and the structure of them scrutinized like only the British could. I wanted to be as good as I could get. Style be damned.

Guess what? The words then stopped. It was no longer fun writing. It became a task, something too clean, more akin to washing the dishes than art. I was in a creative funk. The old me- raw, poetic, rebellious vs the new me- polite, structured, tight. I have been writing through that battle now for the last couple of years. The poet versus the journalist. Perhaps I am a new breed of poetic journalist. But I will let Matt comment about that- he is, of course the expert in all things gonzo.

So there. Not a book review, not an attack on Chuck Palahnuik, just some observations on literary style, from a guy still searching for the best belt to match with his literary hat. Now off I waddle to the bathroom on a quest for the next grand subject. Excuse me a moment.

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Little girls are weird

The bell rang at 3:05, kids of various sizes poured out the school doors. YAY! It was Friday afternoon, hurray for the weekend! My job was to fetch my 10-year-old daughter and three of her closest friends. I spotted one, then two was with three. Where was four? We waited and waited and waited some more. The kids did what kids do, they played tag, wrestled, squealed, squelched, were generally manic. Finally the fourth wacky wee one arrived, something to do with not explaining to the after school program people that she was coming home with us.

Off we went. Me, three girls and their one little boy toy, yee haw. I am not sure how the after school folks do it. I can handle my own, they gray my hair and I love them, but large groups of children frighten me, too damn much nervous energy. The first stop was at my son's best friend's house, to pick up he and his best friend. Are you keeping track? That is me versus six children. Lord of the freaking Flies, I was scared for my life. Fortunately, by the time we picked up the two little fellas, we were only a block or so away from home. I was going to survive the first bit.

Let the party begin! First it was build your own pizza. Kids have weird tastes, pineapple, cheese and Italian sausage, or better, half cheese and half mushroom (divine!). The kids merely picked at their pizzas, it seems that the construction of the pizza was much more fun than its degustation. The pop, ice cream, chips and chocolate chip cookies however, were a huge success. Go figure. I survived the second bit, I began the 3rd bit in the kitchen. Thank you dishes!

Movie time. We rented enough for the kids to stay up well into the next day. Hours and hours of Disney-esque stuff. Zac Efron you cad, you beautiful beast.

The boys left at 8:00ish, the girls shut themselves into the living room, my 6-year-old went to bed, Amy and I locked ourselves into our bedroom. Chick flicks, (I love you Beth Cooper, Superbad with a miniskirt, funny) hurray! Three 10-year-olds girls in an enclosed space, wow the noise they made. It was then that my eye started to twitch...keep it together man, the night was young.

The goal (of course) was for the girls to pull an all-nighter (well duh, it was a sleep-over, don't you know anything?). They tried their best. I had to tell them to try and be a little quieter at 1:20 am. I heard the coming and going of little girl feet until about 3:30 am. Oh man, morning was gonna suck. I survived, sorta.

I tried to sleep in, I figured I might be able to tone out the morning madness with some extra zzzzs. That however, wouldn't have been fair to Amy. Eeeks the natives were hungry, restless and over-tired. Up I sprang to save the day. Why can't I get coffee delivered in a UV drip? A caffeine patch. The bags under my eyes grew four times that morning, but there were eggs to be scrabbled, bagels to toast, juice to pour, geesh.

Yawn. Amy wants to do this every month or so. Help me.

Ewwww, messy

art

as the
spirit
wanes
the
form
appears.

~ Charles Bukowski

The spirit has definitely waned, I lack form, I am formless. I am in a creative void, beyond bastardly writer's block, this is a void of black hole-like proportions... HUGE. I am cut to the core, I am questioning why I pretend to play the game at all. What is the point?

Once a week or so, after I tell someone I am a writer, I get asked what I write, or what kind of a writer I am. I usually begin my response with a um, well I have a diploma in journalism (ooo, ahh, how interesting), I haven't been published, it is rough out there, yada, yada, meh. The whole damn thing reminds me of when I was a vegetarian, I was asked and asked and asked again why I didn't eat meat. At first it was easy. I would say something along the lines that I was against the domestication and slaughter of animals for food. Yes, that was me, I was one of those pretentious, wanna be hippies (the first step is admitting it), thank gawd my love of meat and need for protein won the day. That Double Mozza Burger from A & W, nothing ever tasted better. Drool.

Wait, wait, does that mean I am giving up on writing because I find it pretentious, because I can't fit myself into a neat box? Nah, I simply feel a little cornered right now. I am worried that writing is nothing more than a hobby, or worse, a bad habit. I worry that, I simply write for fun, that I will never be able to make a living as a writer. I am suffering from a crisis of confidence and it sucks.

But worry not. I will not be stuffed into a box... no way, never! The way I write, the why and how I write, hell I can't really intelligently answer those questions. I just do. I write because it is a biological imperative, it's like burping, like farting, a piss or a shit. If I don't write, I might explode. Ewwww, messy.

The planting papers: Nick the night clown

Back to Whyte Avenue, the Commercial Hotel, Edmonton Alberta, Canada. Add 35 or so dirty, stinky tree planters and a night manager who can't stand dirty, stinky tree planters, comedy would surly ensue. The night manager, Nick was his name, he was a bit of a celebrity, a clown of a fella, hence the nickname: Nick the night clown.

Nick had his eye on me, he could smell a rat and I was coming off rodent. The scam, I will have you know, was to have a group of 20 or so planters book 4 or 5 rooms, then, get this, someone would open up the fire exit letting the other 10 or so planters sneak in. We had done it a bunch of times before and without fail. We were convinced that we could pull it off again this time. What could wrong? Really, I mean we were dealing with Nick the night clown, a mental midget, too easy.

Before the caper began, we hit the pub attached to the Commercial. A little pool and some liquid courage to sharpen the senses. The Commercial Pub was a biker/blues bar, a tough spot, but with great music and cheap booze. It was never a spot where you ended your night, but it was a helluva spot to start. But where was I? Oh yes, plying myself with beer, waiting for the signal... operation hotel room would soon begin.

Myself and my buddy Clarke needed some fresh threads (no mean feat, everything we owned, if dry, was stained a nice earthy brown). Off we went into the Ryder truck which housed all our gear. Clarke, gawd love him found a can of Bear Scare (pepper spray), he decided it was a good idea to spray a little, just a little, in the back of the Ryder, 'you know just to see what it was like'. See, who could see? The whole of the box of the Ryder was filled with the noxious spray. Blinded, coughing and yes laughing, we jumped out of the back of the truck. We had to walk it off, we still haven't found a room to crash, yet. Ouch, it burned, it burned.

Once our eyes stopped watering Clarke and I decided to try and find our bed for the night. We went back into the pub, found someone who had a room, asked them to meet us at the fire exit. Clarke went up first, peeked into the hallway, gave a thumbs up and disappeared inside. Up I went, I peeked into the hallway, first I looked left, no Nick, then I looked right, no Nick. A huzzah to the perfect crime.

In order to ebb suspicion, I carefully shut and locked the fire exit. 'HEY!' There he was, there was Nick the night clown at the end of the hallway. Flashlight in hand and approaching fast. 'Hey you, stop, wait, you get out of here'. I sprang down the hall, into a stairwell down a coupla flights of stairs, zoom into a lady's washroom (Nick would never look there). I waited for five minutes, crossed my fingers that there were no ladies with any biological needs, then tried my luck.

BUSTED! 'There you are, I caught you, you leave the hotel, if I see you in here again, I will call the police'. 'Yes sir, I am sorry sir'.

Fuck, where was I gonna stay? I was broke, it was late. Everyone I knew was either in the hotel or out about town. Hmmmm? The Ryder, could I sleep there? It was a warm night, it was shelter, it was free, what the hell?

I ripped open the back door of the Ryder, whoosh, the lingering fumes of pepper spray smacked me in the face. Yep, I was living large. Hurray for me! I moved a few duffel bags around, I made myself a comfy nest. I slept, well sorta.

Ronald

Caption, but be kind. I mean look at him.

The Truth Won't Set Us Free

We know the truth. Michael Werbowski, in "America: After the Fall", tells us ...

20 years after the fall of communism, American-style capitalism has also fallen. But the downfall was silent, without any visible walls toppling or crumbling. The 9/11-like collapse of the financial firms of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers left no piles of rubble or slabs of fractured concrete on the ground, just lots of laid off traders and deal makers. But the brokerage and investment banks' end signaled the death knell of market capitalism as we knew it; another misbegotten ideology born out of the musings of Adam Smith, Ricardo and Milton Friedman was laid to rest unceremoniously. The troika which presumed that man’s most bestial instincts can be curbed in the pursuit of profit and happiness were wrong ...

The president’s inverted version of “perestroika” (that is, the restructuring or retooling of the economy) has been fine tuned to meet the need of the oligarchs and corporate barons who support him and prompt him behind the curtains. Obama and his czar–commissars (and his adoring minions of PR spin operatives) have deftly in a brilliant slight of hand in one swift jest, effectively expropriated the entire financial and industrial sectors in America by means of massive taxpayer funded “bail outs”. These ploys have turned the essence of capitalism upside down, by rewarding cronyism and criminal behavior to the point where “crime pays” very handsomely indeed, and enables billionaires, fraudsters and financiers to obtain great gain almost without almost any pain or punishment. These perverse policies are likely to fail. In the end, Gorbachev’s policies, although ostensibly well meaning, actually hastened the demise of the Soviet state. This later led to its fragmentation and disintegration of the communist superpower and its Eastern Empire. America’s current plight may lead to a similar outcome.

We know the truth. In his piece, "Self-jiving Nation", Jim Kunstler writes ...

If you think we have been in a crisis of finance and economy for the past year or so, consider that we have also been sunk in a comprehensive crisis of leadership. Nobody in authority is willing to face the truth, state the truth, and offer a reality-based idea about how to meet the truth, This is a leadership failure not just in politics and government, but also in business, in the university faculties, in the editorial and production offices of the news media, and even among a barely-breathing clergy ...

We know the truth, but we can't handle it. We grasp at straws of hope, looking for anything in the media blabber and bluster to light the sky over the wasteland. Even the survivalists don't seem to grasp that "The World as We Know It" is gone; what we see now is a chimera, and that's about all.

See it or not, most of us are sucking on a try breast of truly "faith-based" delusion that somehow "recovery" is just over the horizon.

I cringe when I hear that this will be a "jobless recovery". That is the new leader on the list of oxymora. An economic landscape which benefits only those who steal their money from the people is the new truth. We have not, through "bailouts", invested in a system in which the rich elitists reinvest their riches in the interest of a valued, common society of equal human beings. Fuggedaboutit!

But instead of moving gamely through the steps of dealing with our grief over the loss of comfortable, debt-generated illusion, we are caught in the vicious cycle of denial and anger, denial and anger, ad infinitum. And instead of turning our anger against those who have stolen our dreams (they were nothing more than that), we rage against each other in polarized cults, thinking we inhabit our own chosen political temples of truth. Such folly. Heh. We've got 'em just where they want us.

The truth is plain. Last week at the International Forecaster, in "A New System For The Privleged Is Not A Remedy For The Economy", the author writes ...

Our usurping, . . . spendthrift President, together with our corrupt, elitist-bootlicking Congress of money-grabbing Dumbos and Jackasses, are spending us into a multi-trillion dollar hyperinflationary oblivion as their ratings by their constituents drop into the toilet bowl, ratings which are disgracefully the lowest in all of US history. With a diabolical "Robin Hood in Reverse" plan in place since 1913 for the extortion of money from the US middle class to reduce their serfs to poverty and abject slavery, the Illuminati have managed to use the Federal Reserve Act and US income tax, together with the Social Security Ponzi Scheme, phony, orchestrated wars for profit, socialization of bankster-gangster losses, the globalism/free trade/off-shoring/outsourcing/legal-illegal immigration agendas, and a totally bought-and-paid-for President, Congress, judiciary and regulatory agencies, to reduce US citizens to consumerist credit addicts, living pay check to pay check like narcissistic hedonists ...

There's that word again - "narcissist".

This is from a book review piece done back in April by MSNBC/Today Show, "Me, me, me! America’s ‘Narcissism Epidemic’" ...

A popular song declares, with no apparent sarcasm, "I believe that the world should revolve around me!" People buy expensive homes with loans far beyond their ability to pay — or at least they did until the mortgage market collapsed as a result. Babies wear bibs embroidered with "Supermodel" or "Chick Magnet" and suck on "Bling" pacifiers while their parents read modernized nursery rhymes from This Little Piggy Went to Prada. People strive to create a "personal brand" (also called "self-branding"), packaging themselves like a product to be sold. Ads for financial services proclaim that retirement helps you return to childhood and pursue your dreams. High school students pummel classmates and then seek attention for their violence by posting YouTube videos of the beatings.

Although these seem like a random collection of current trends, all are rooted in a single underlying shift in the American psychology: the relentless rise of narcissism in our culture. Not only are there more narcissists than ever, but non-narcissistic people are seduced by the increasing emphasis on material wealth, physical appearance, celebrity worship, and attention seeking. Standards have shifted, sucking otherwise humble people into the vortex of granite countertops, tricked-out MySpace pages, and plastic surgery. A popular dance track repeats the words "money, success, fame, glamour" over and over, declaring that all other values have "either been discredited or destroyed."

The United States is currently suffering from an epidemic of narcissism. Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines an epidemic as an affliction "affecting ... a disproportionately large number of individuals within a population," and narcissism more than fits the bill. In data from 37,000 college students, narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present, with the shift especially pronounced for women ...

Yes, you see, we know the truth. We just can't do anything with the awful stuff.

Consider ... the primary thesis of classical liberalism, now brought to the farthest extremes in our society, dictates that the individual embodies the highest form of being, endowed with inalienable rights. No matter that the pursuit of such rights pretty much guarantees the alienation of everyone else's rights. The reconciliation was supposed to be managed by capitalism, thus taking the need for personal responsibility away from the individual and allowing "markets" to govern our behaviors. That, as Werbowski notes above, has finally failed, leaving the thieves with the keys and combinations to all the safes.

The truth is this: we have been and are being inexorably distracted from grasping the truth - wars, health care "reform", same-sex marriage, economic "recovery" statistics, cash for clunkers, political and media peccadilloes, and all the silly crap we are fed on a daily basis are a cacophonous diverson from the stark reality that the bread is all but gone and the circus is in town.

In "Social Decay in America" at CounterPunch, John stanton writes ...

American society merrily avoids accountability and responsibility. Americans seek the loophole and blame others--be they individuals, networks or nations--for their own deficiencies. American leaders direct the consequences of poor judgment down the chain-of-command. Why?

The American people have taken the bait from the nation’s op-ed writers and talking heads, corporate CEO’s, financiers, the president, members of congress, justices of the Supreme Court, governors, sports/movie/think-tank/academic stars, and military leaders. In the USA these are the script writers of the American narrative and masters of the American consciousness. They stand firm in their belief that the masses down below will follow their words and deeds, even die for them. They are the Unaccountable Elite.

And the American people don’t disappoint. Only on rare occasions is an “American leader” taken to task by a concerned public. The American people revel in their leaders, glorifying and emulating them and striving, one day, to make it like their idols did. In so doing they have forsaken their duty as American citizens to hold their leaders to account and, as consumers, divine what is theater and what is not ...

Maybe, just maybe, the truth will set some of us free. But first, it is driving us crazy.

Categories: Americanism, narcissism, post-democracy, post-economics, post-society, reality

[originally posted at P!]