News media must quit crying ‘Wolf’
There are two kinds of news these days. No, not real and fake. Fake news isn’t news at all. It’s the bullshit people of questionable intellectual prowess read in their social media feeds and then are stupid enough to pass along because they want it to be true. It’s fodder for the single-celled politicos who are destroying our democracy. The hard truth is, it only exists because half of us are too stupid to deserve to live in a democracy, a form of government that actually requires a modicum of civic responsibility rather than just going on an endless digital quest to find content that tells us we are always right and smart, and that people who disagree with us are wrong and stupid. As media consumers we are the equivalent of first graders who haven’t had a nap. We have Trump because we deserve Trump, because we won’t do the work required for meaningful self-rule. Sorry, we digress.
The two types of news: 1) news that is gathered to inform and 2) news that is generated to draw the largest audience possible and only serves as a distraction to the other kind of news. The most recent example being the two pages of Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return that quite possibly were leaked by the Trump folks themselves.
Why Rachel, why did you take the Trump Trojan Horse and pull it inside the nation’s news-media fort? Just so you could drive MSNBC ratings by claiming, “We have the tax returns?” That is what you said and in context it is as big a lie as anything Trump has told. And just when you were doing such good work on Trump/Russia of late.
Thanks to your taking and overhyping this Trumpland tax bait, we have once again been distracted into losing two or three days of critical reporting time on issues like Russia/Trump, Trump lies about Obama “wiretapping,” healthcare destruction and the gutting of our environmental regulations. It’s time for the mainstream media to get serious and stay serious. Remember what happened to the boy who cried wolf too many times?
What did you say?
Every so often in the BW office, we hear a voice appear out of nowhere, no human attached. For some reason any one of the plethora of iPhones around here will start talking to us via the human-like bot Siri. No one has pushed any buttons or asked her a question… she just starts talking as her owner scrambles to shut her up and turn her off. Although iPhone users have complained about this phenomena for years, it seems to be happening more and more frequently.
Some may call it a glitch, while other more conspiratorial types may blame it on aliens. It very may well be the federal government, or at the very least Obama wiretapping Boulder Weekly. Or maybe we are just making sounds similar to “Siri” and “Alexa” while never saying the names explicitly.
Regardless, it’s another example of the increasing robotization of American society, something we all better get used to. This includes the Trump administration who doesn’t seem to understand that it’s not just Americans who will be loosing our jobs to increasing automation in the future, it’s everyone. And if the U.S. really wants to lead the world instead of just talk about leading the world, if we really want to be the best instead of just believing we are the best, we should probably start creating innovative solutions to create more American jobs and stop blaming it on, once again, Obama.
P.S. The same thing happens often with Google’s bot Alexa, although thank God we don’t have any of those in the office. Yet.
