Stupidity or Hypocrisy?

Posted by Larry Miller on June 7, 2010 under Why | Be the First to Comment

Sometimes I look at the news and wonder if the people writing the stories or those talking to the press even think about what they are passing on the the formerly unsuspecting public. Of course the story may fit the propaganda needs of the issuing government or news organization, but they could at least work a little harder to give us plausible (mis)information that doesn’t strain the credibility of even recent public high school grads.

The current journalistic malfeasance is a story I picked up this afternoon about how the Israel’s recent actions were straining the relationship they had with the government of Turkey. A quick review of the facts shows this to be a ridiculous position from the very start. This “offended” Turkish government gave behind the scenes approval to send a ship load of goods, wide eyed ideologues and a few weapons into an area that the Israeli government had publicly stated for years was a source of terrorist activity against their citizens.

The fact that the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) stopped the ship and several of the activists died in the process of beating and stabbing the Jewish defenders is considered by the Turks as an affront to their formerly great nation. Their fussing over IDF action defending their homeland is akin to North Korea telling the world that maybe the South Korean vessel was struck by a torpedo, but but that any retaliation would be an act of war. What do these people think of the initial provocation?

It is this inability to acknowledge their own involvement in behavior that challenges the security of another nation – supposedly a friend – that nullifies any outrage they may be expressing publicly. The indignation that Turkey, and most of the rest of the world, express at efforts to prevent terrorist attacks is pure baloney. They say Israel persecutes the poor, so-called, Palestinians, yet justifies it’s own treatment of the Kurdish minority within their own borders. Many of these Kurds have died at the hands of the Turkish government and still others are political prisoners for such misdeeds as “crimes of opinion”.

We can’t just blindly accept everything coming from the news outlets around the globe at face value. We, unfortunately, live in a time when news is often valued for its propaganda value and not for reporting facts about the world around us. It’s like my son is fond of saying, “they wouldn’t tell us these things if they didn’t want us to believe them.”

When confronted by such non-sequiturs from fourth estate, we should express our own indignation they should think us so unobservant, ignorant or just plain foolish that we would accept anything that comes from a man in a nice suit with a great haircut or a good looking infobabe on the tube. If it doesn’t pass the “smell test” we need to keep looking for more answers. On the other hand, it may be that many in the news organizations are working up to their intellectual capacity and do not even realize the balderdash they are presenting for public consumption. In either case, it kind of explains why the formerly mainstream media is the formerly mainstream media.