Once again I set out to write about something in the news and got distracted by something else. In this case I was going to talk about Terri Schiavo. But honestly, who wants that? It’s so over done and, just like the woman in question, the entire topic has just hung around too long.
So I‘ll talk about the bastard alliance of conservative, puritan values called the News. This organization (and yes folks, the different networks and sources area organized to an impressive [disturbing] extent) is so slanted that it took me, well, minutes of looking online for less biased sources than what was easily obtained. But I’m a quick read, so just understand that a few minutes was more than it should have taken.
First off, nearly every source I’ve ready has been slightly skewed to right, saying that it’s bad that she’s off the tube. There’s no feasible way for this woman to ever ever come back to the real world. Scientific doubt? No.
The issue isn’t even with the law. No, when 2 Bushes get stopped in a political arena already overly represented by their own party you know the law is pretty well set down in this case. So where’s the doubt? In the church.
And the main problem here is that shouldn’t be a fucking problem. Like most of my friends I don’t believe in Jesus. I think the church is a corrupt and morally fossilized entity. And I’ve always been uncomfortable around priests. Unlike most my friends, I wasn’t raised with either a serious attempt, nor even the pretext of one, that Jesus was anywhere near the truth. This gives me the special position to be American (shudder) and not involved in the church split. When I reject Jesus, it’s a passive move, not an active denial. Jesus was a dude. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus is a big lie. I can say that without taking a radical position. That’s how I was raised.
The problem here is that the news seems to have standards I don’t. I don’t mean that the news is conservative and I’m not so it’s bad. I mean that the news is taking a stance on the Schiavo case founded on Christian ideas and that is bad. The news should be secular. If it were religious it would be Church/State propaganda. Now, I know there’s a spectrum here. On the far right I read an article that said she was being denied her last rites. Unless everyone dies on Easter, they completely got the facts wrong. Of course, the site had an ad for Ann Coulter’s book so I printed it out and flushed it town the toilet right away.
The news ranges from obscenely biased to subtly biased, though. There’s no source that takes on the facts head on. If they ally themselves with the church then they talk about how much of a travesty her not being allowed communion is (though they did allow it to her…). If the source sides against the church then they don’t report on Schiavo, they report on how much of a cocksucker the church is being.
And it’s this attitude I simply can’t stand. Now that it’s been so polarized by this case, it’s coming out everywhere. It’s like no one even tries to pretend that there’s a line between news/state and church/Jesus. I remember those days! And those days weren’t even good enough to qualify as good!
Example: Associated Press on the discovery of Tyrannosaurus Rex soft tissue. That’s right, a religiously skewed story on dinosaurs. In a video from AP they discuss how extractable dinosaur DNA might be available in a soft tissue sample recently discovered. I know that Jurassic Park references can’t be avoided, but the video was about 50/50 with news footage and movie footage. The possibility of actually finding the evolutionary line from the dinosaurs was glossed over and when a paleontologist stated that they might not even be able to find the right DNA and that they were not yet cloning dinosaurs the reported nearly crapped herself. “Yet?!” she exclaimed, as if Spielberg was a prophet and Crichton wasn’t a hack.
Without explicitly saying it, the issue of playing god was her focus and not the news at hand. And I’m so fucking sick of this slanted journalism. There aren’t any good sources left! Nearly anything mainstream is republican and god-fearing. And if a source isn’t then they’re too busy bragging about how much they aren’t republican and god-fearing to actually report. Specifically “liberal” media sources are just Leftist political machines. I’m not saying the media is a liberal power. It’s quite the opposite. But these granola-crunchy hippies are so busy tooting their own horn for not being a cog in the mainstream machine that they end up not even being a part of a machine. It’s like me talking about how much I’m not an Orthodox Jew. Fine, but that doesn’t mean that I’m now a non-biased source on Orthodox Judaism. Same with the overtly liberal sources: they don’t really qualify as news sources either. They exist simply not to be conservative.
That’s really all I want to say on that. It just makes me so mad when not only does one side lie about what’s going on, but the other is so busy “not lying” that they only repeat “We are the truth” without having a message. So I’ll leave you with a story that was once told to me by a very wise man. I believe he was a prophet, but that’s really beside the point.
“Pete and Repeat were in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was left? The fucking news media!”
