Journal the_mad_poster's Journal: Eat Fact, Retards 4

Not that I expect the type of morons who were going along with these claims are smart enough to accept this decision, of course

It won't work - they've been chewing too much lead-based paint. But that's okay, because Jeebus will save them.

Man, when the social/political pendulum starts to swing back in the other direction, they're gonna be left behind like road kill or dinosaurs, unable to cope with the change.

Do NOT, I repeat do NOT give the fucking MEDIA a free pass on this. Nobody would have thought that M. Schiavo was abusive if the right-wing corpo-fascist media hadn't shouted it far and wide. This is one of the problems that arise from the media abandoning their traditional role as arbiters of worthy content ("filters" to the reich-wing) in search of this elusive "balance" we keep hearing so much about. The problem with balance is that when the loony-ass right is so far out in the fucking deep end while the sensible left continues to maintain it's position in the spectrum, where the middle winds up being is considerably rightward of where the middle actually is. And they've figured that out, so they keep going farther and farther out into deep-right field (shit, I think they're in the parking lot by now) so that the prevailing tone of media discourse in the country is more and more right-leaning. These two things combined with the recent waves of rampant media conglomeratization, corporatization and deregulation (I mean seriously, as soon as I heard Disney was buying ABC I knew we were fucked, and we have been) have produced an atmosphere where a) the media feel immensely pressured by the far right to spew corpo-fascist propaganda, b) there is no countervailing pressure from the far-left, mostly because there isn't really much of a far-left anymore, and c) since the death of the "Fairness Doctrine", there is absolutely NO pressure on the media for them to use their brains and figure out for themselves what's factually correct and what's not. This results in the news having degenerated into "he-said-she-said". Time was, upon hearing of these allegations, a newspaper would have dispatched an investigative reporter, who would have gone and interviewed Terry's friends, family, anybody who might have ever had any reason to suspect abuse on Michael's part. That reporter would have then, based on the facts and the evidence obtained by their investigation, decided what kind of story to write. But now they just report anything anybody says, as long as it's contradicted by something somebody else says, not seeing how horribly this is doing the job of *reporting news*.

The media hold a unique position in American life, they are the much-vaunted Fourth Estate, and I was raised to believe that privilges go hand in hand with responsibilities. They should be expected to report what is *factually accurate* (contrary to the Bush Administration's wishes, facts actually do exist), and they should have their tender little feet held to a very large fire by us, as consumers and citizens, when they don't. But they don't and we don't, respectively. It's not the "culture of life" we have to be worried about, my friends - it's the Culture of Laziness. OUR laziness.

I'm pissed cuz they got me on this one. I heard from so many different news sources, both local (I live in FL) and national, that there were overwhelming rumors of Michael being abusive that I was willing to grant it more credence than it deserved.

And I'd like to be the first person in any kind of media whatsoever (I know, I'm flattering myself) to say: Michael, I'm sorry. I was wrong.

This is also one of the problems that arise from the time-honored reich-wing tactic of mounting wholesale character assassination on anybody who stands a chance of putting truth, reason, justice and the American Way between them and what they want. If I were M. Schiavo, I'd be suing the shit out of anybody that so much as hinted that he might have been a) abusive and b) directly or indirectly responsible for Terry's condition until the cows came home.

It seems pretty clear that this whole giant controversy, that got so many people so riled up, was nothing more than another attempt by the right to make the left look immoral - it was just another game of political brinksmanship. Thank God they lost - of course, they're already deriding the polls that show overwhelmingly that they lost as the product of a "liberal media". WHAT liberal media?! [whatliberalmedia.com] I'd KILL for some good old liberal media right about now!