And while we’re on the subject

Our national news just sucks. Including FNC, although they at least aren’t slavishly devoted to liberal ideals like CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PMSNBC, et al., and they do have incredible news babes unlike the aforenamed.
Let’s review why this is (the suckage, that is). First, an inability to decide what is really of national import. (The Fox Car Chase Channel is how I often refer to FNC…one guess why. Who really gives a damn, other than people in the area affected, that some moron is leading cops on a high-speed chase down the freeway?) Second, the same inability to let go of a story as a dog has to let go of a favorite bone. Third, a complete parochial ignorance of anything international UNLESS it has specific ties or import to Americans.
The third reason is why we don’t hear about Bali, or about the financial mess in Japan that’s due to the fact that the government is unwilling to bite the bullet like we did in our savings and loan “crisis” and bail out the banks that are holding almost nothing but worthless paper. Or about what’s really going on in Russia these days, or in Canada, both places being countries where the citizenry don’t think like their governments and don’t really hate Americans like their governments do.
There is no real investigative reporting done today that is worthy of the name.
And that is perhaps the real shame. Because Americans don’t really know what is going on in the rest of the world. And it is directly the fault of our own news media — who are closing down international bureaus left and right in the name of saving money — that this is the case.
Why were Americans so shocked on 9/11? Not because the CIA or the FBI screwed the pooch, although it’s pretty clear they did. Rather, because our vaunted news media let us down and lulled us by 10 September 2001 into the same false sense of security that we had on 6 December 1941.
The infamy is that the news organizations have, ever since 9/11, scrambled to point fingers everywhere but at themselves. An informed public will not let its government go slack on national security. An uninformed public won’t even know national security is slack until a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11 happens in their face.
The whole thing is a shandeh un a charpeh. (You could look it up.)