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Headline in today’s WaPo – “What’s really going on in DC? What you see depends on who’s filming.”
ALMOST NOBODY USES FILM ANYMORE. NOBODY. The ignorance, the ignorance. Words matter. Or at least they should. They used to.
Caps are now hats. Digital video, is film. Lecterns are podiums. Up is down and down is up. Ignorance is celebrated and intellectual pursuits are just another form of elitism to be berated and shunned.
When everybody is a “Multi-media journalist,” doing three or four jobs, is there anybody left with enough time to do real Journalism? What the hell, nobody reads much of anything anymore, anyway.
Another WaPo headline this AM – “[Pentagon plans military deployment in Chicago as Trump eyes crackdown](https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/trump-chicago…/)” Oh really? Is this WaPo “exclusive” actually happening or is it just clickbait? What isn’t going through the demented brain of DJT? Did they get any real corroboration or is this just something somebody heard in the hallway?
The reporting could be valid, but in this age of clickbait with some of the best reporters abandoning formerly great newspapers after they are bought out by billionaires who appear to back Trump, who really knows?
If they don’t know the difference between digital video and film or a cap and a hat, what do they know?
I don’t recall the Governor of California or Illinois or Maryland or the Mayor of D.C., or anybody else in their right mind requesting a call-up of federal troops. I do know some things as fact, although like millions upon millions of other Americans I am so exhausted, so burned out by Trump’s gaslighting, his non-stop river of BS, that at times I doubt my own mental acuity.
We’re all being sucked into a giant black hole. Or so it feels. Or maybe Trump is going to militarize/federalize all of America? Not that he just wants to or is thinking about it, but that he is in the process of doing it. Right now. Shouldn’t that be the headline?
“TRUMP HATCHES HITLERIAN PLOT TO FILL AMERICA’S STREETS WITH SOLDIERS” Too strong? Too real for a country remaining largely in denial?
What was it that the great Sinclair Lewis wrote back in 1935? “It Can’t Happen Here?”
Increasingly, I find I am being driven back to a couple of locals for tv news. KTLA is good. So are WPXI and KDKA, in Pittsburgh. Just today, I found myself installing KABC, Los Angeles.
I was watching Al Jazeera, for its extensive coverage of the Middle East, but it has now become nearly all-Gaza, almost all the time. Which probably makes sense, given the channels location and the scope of the atrocity, the absolutely unspeakable slaughter that’s taking place there. That said, I need a little more variety in the coverage of world events.
Eurovision, was also a pretty good option, until they left reality for what appears to be AI generated programming. If I’m wrong, then my apologies, but it sure sounds like AI. Whatever it is, it isn’t working. Neither are the novice anchors France24 is using, most of them being nowhere near ready for a prime time debut on an international stage.
With the great newspapers and the network news operations dying off, locals may be our broadcasts of last resort? And if they eventually die off, we’ll have nothing left but the “get what you want and not what you need” Internet. For me, PBS, has always been a little dry. With or without federal funding.
It’s happening much faster than I thought it would. Kinda like Trump establishing his oligarchy. Or should I say, dictatorship? As the free press takes a dive, tyranny goes for a ride. In a big convertible with the top down. Never thought I’d see this in our time.
How ironic it will be, if we are left with local tv news as our broadcasts of last resort, with all else having been either bought off and shut down or completely corrupted by soulless predatory capitalism spearheaded by a foreign oligarch. God help us if the Associated Press goes away. If it does, we’ll be left with nothing but local news, which will be better than nothing, but far less than what we need.
The BBC and SkyNews will still be out there, probably. It’s difficult for me to imagine those two British institutions replacing the once mighty CBS, NBC and ABC networks. It is though a thread of hope to cling to, I suppose.
It feels more and more like we’re falling backwards into an Orwellian nightmare. A bad dream of such complexity, with so many hi-tech moving parts, that we can’t adequately grasp what’s happening. But it’s definitely there. It’s our new American Collective, and it’s far more than those of us on the Internet being profiled by marketers who want to sell us piles of junk.
All those profiles, some of them drilling deep into who we are, will eventually be pulled together into one massive data bank with the ability to better contain and control us. At the same time, newspapers have been going out of business, with the latest attack against a free press aimed at the Wall Street Journal, for an expose of Donald Trump.
Hopefully, Murdoch and the Journal won’t follow in Shari Redstone’s footsteps, with Paramount’s $16 million dollar payout to DJT’s protection racket. It was the utter castration of a once proud network news operation, with Paramount’s Board of Directors, wielding the scalpel.
Don’t take it personally though, it’s only business, even if it does result in our increased collective ignorance.
Politico reports that more than two-thirds of the country’s newspaper jobs have vanished since 2005. The ax is falling in newsrooms at many local tv stations as well. I know this to be a fact, as some of my friends have been victims of the corporate cost-cutting (p)urge. There is also PBS. Obviously Donald Trump and his minions want that to just go away.
Oversight, the kind provided by a free press and guaranteed by the First Amendment, can be such a pain.
And there you have a couple of fronts in the war against American Democracy, the aggregation of information about each and every one of us via the Internet, while, at the same time, traditional sources of news and information are being shut down or are going under as their traditional revenue streams leave for cyberspace, which increasingly steals the eyeballs of readers and viewers.
Absent professional Journalism, people are getting what they want, and not what they need. It’s the perfect storm for a burgeoning autocracy, all of it fitting nicely into the plans of any traditional autocrat or fascist.
Historically, killing the flow of information provided by a free press is near the top of their primary agendas when subduing a soon to be conquered people, as the oligarchs eat away at our freedoms bit by bit. So little goes with each bite, that it’s hardly noticed. Even if it is noticed, it seems relatively harmless, until you begin to add it all up.
Without a free press we are increasingly ignorant, making it increasingly difficult or even impossible to hold our elected leaders accountable, making it next to impossible to sustain a working democracy. All the while they continue collating new data on each of us. And even with all of this, we still haven’t gotten to the cameras.
It started with security cameras in retail outlets and government buildings, I guess. Then, suddenly, there were cameras at almost every intersection. Cameras, cameras, everywhere, inside and out. But who’s complaining? It was all about keeping us safe, right? It was cost-effective too, using cameras instead of people to keep an eye on things.
That’s what I was thinking as I recently installed our new video doorbell. Something I was prompted to do after that recent home invasion robbery and double murder back in Encino. A video doorbell, only seemed to make good sense. And it works very well, I must say, giving us a running record of everyone who comes to the door, and more. With AI, it remembers faces and cars. Amazing, no? Well, it’s amazing to me. I can remember when we had just one wired phone and it was on a “party line” back in rural Minnesota.
This new era of extreme audio and video coverage is both wonderful and dangerous, as eventually some new “collective” will have gathered not only digital personal profiles on us all, they will have also patched all the cameras together, keeping tabs not just on every damn thing we’ve done, but whatever we happen to be doing at any given moment.
Even now, privacy is a distant memory for those of us old enough to remember what it was.
Live and in color, the collective will be watching and listening. It’s more than something Orwell dreamed up, it’s our new reality, and it’s probably more akin to the Hitler Youth Movement keeping an eye on everything that happened in the neighborhood. That one really snuck up on the Germans, didn’t it?
But in the here and now, nobody seems to be all that worried about it. The big digital information gathering and traditional press killing picture, I mean. Even while Donald J. Trump, files his most recent lawsuit against the press, attempting to discourage and contain allegations of who really knows what with regard to his former good buddy Jeffrey Epstein? If only the government would release all the files, not just from the grand jury, but the complete FBI investigation. Suppose Pam Bondi, will ever do that? Without being ordered to by Trump, I mean.
Again, oversight can be such a pain. All those reporters poking around, with no agenda other than digging out the truth. We can’t have that. Oh, hell no. What we can have is a new collective, armed with our personal profiles while video and audio coverage of our each and every move increases daily, with the installation of each new camera.
Driven by fear, under the banner of “I have seen the enemy and he is us,” we could very well be assisting in the destruction of our free society, as the free press dies and our democratic institutions are torn to pieces while we the people install cameras, both inside and outside our homes, all of them standing by for some massive all in one AI hookup.
Welcome to the new collective, comrade. And please remember, when our free press is gone, our freedom will be going with it. Now that’ll be a real deep state. And they’ll have it all, each and every painful moment of it, on camera.
So tired of all the negative crap about Journalism and journalists, all the lies and phony baloney. The business of Journalism, may have lost its way as sales, promotion and new media pushed out the traditional reporters and editors, but there are still thousands of us out here, committed to the truth. Thousands of us who spent our lives dedicated to enlightening and educating our viewers and readers. I have no regrets about how I spent my life, working to ferret out the truth and then sending it on its way for the betterment of humankind. We need to stand tall for who we are and spit in the eye of those who promote falsehood.
