The "News" Disgusts Me

Is it just me, or has the world gone crazy?

A huge storm system moved through town today, and so I was watching the local news channel for weather info. I left the TV on CBS and ended up watching Katie Couric's "News" cast. The entire thing has been the most insane take on "news" or even "reality" than I have seen yet - we're talking worse than CNN here.

Let me summarize my frustrations with a single segment - coverage on the war in Iraq. It's no question that casualty figures would frame the segment, and every mention of things going well in Iraq followed by the obligatory "but." The segment totally ignored the ongoing military operation in Baqubah and instead claimed with no evidence that the military admitted that top al Qaeda leaders "escaped" from the city. Casualty figures were then reported as if they were independent of the operation (and remember that the old media likes to describe casualty figures as if our solders were just standing around getting killed - but ignoring a 10,000 soldier operation should be criminal). Finally, the correspondent finished by claiming that the "surge" in Iraq was being met with an al Qaeda "surge" of its own as he signed off with the inevitable picture of Iraq citizens bleeding and being carried off on stretchers. "Reporting from the Pentagon" was the only informative thing the reporter said.

This kind of reporting begs the question of whether or not the national old media is honestly trying to deceive and mislead the American people, or whether or not the reporters in the field (or in a posh hotel in D.C.) are so inexorably anti-war and anti-administration that their reports are written in such a way that it seems they want those watching the newscast to think the war in Iraq is lost/our soldiers are dying for nothing/the entire Iraq situation is hopeless.

I absolutely despise the old media. If you watch ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, or even FoxNews it's time for you to branch out. The media does not want you to think for yourself - they want to tell you what the world is like and they want you to believe them. Even though they aren't even there to cover it.

A rock could do a better job of reporting the war in Iraq than Katie and her "news" team. Ridiculous.