News in 2010

After a few months of really hard work and insomnia and not meeting deadlines, I finally got a few days off. No big plans for these days, apart from catching up with some studying and watching some news. News…

So, this morning I was watching Fox & Friends and they showed images of an apparent riot at Moscow airport because people have been stranded there for days because of weather conditions, as have folks in the US and Europe. You can see the Euronews report here. Of course people are pissed off, nobody likes to spend even one hour waiting for an airplane. The problem with Fox & Friends was that, as they were showing the images of people protesting in Moscow, the hypothetical questions started and they were something like: ‘could we see something like this in NYC? People have been at the airport for three, maybe four days here, so could this be a possibility? If the situation continues, people might start doing the same…’

I saw the same story on CNNI, they showed the same images, but instead of coming up with hypothetical things and making audiences think, ‘uh, this WAS President Obama’s fault, he should be shoveling snow off the tarmac right now!’, I actually learned what was going on there.

This is something that really pissed me off this year: the hypothetical news, the passionate-blogger news, the no news-value news. And they’re everywhere.

I’m a big fan of Twitter, for me it’s the best way to compile all the organizations or people you want to get news from, but I guess in the urge of producing more and more content you can see stuff that, well, should be left unsaid, like when our local newspaper Correio do Povo reports something like: “Beach vacationers enjoy the day walking along the shoreline”. If you knew what the shoreline really looks like in my state, you’d be running like hell from it. (Oh, so maybe THAT’s the news! People enjoying themselves on the awful beach shore!)

Photo taken in Imbé

This year was definitely Jon Stewart’s year. Having a comedy show, it’s obviously easy for him to make fun of the absurdities that politicians and pundits say, but the different thing about him is that the show researches and checks facts before putting something on the air and one of his biggest trademarks is the sound bites shown to contradict what somebody is now saying so passionately on TV (this is now being used by AC360. Couldn’t have he done this before?) Anyway, one of my favorite moments was the ‘republicans will ride in the “back of the car”/”back of the bus” thing’. In the failed attempt to get people to vote in midterm elections, Obama said he wouldn’t give the car keys back and GOP would have to sit in the back of the car. Well, guess what Fox News reported…?

They simply progressively replaced “car” by “bus” and this obviously became a racial issue. The whole Jon Stewart segment can be seen here, really worth watching!!! What makes me angry is the progressive change, you know? Slowly and subtly during the hard news, and then boooom! Obama wants to send all Americans to concentration camps. In the back of the bus.

But I think one of the most outrageous passionate-blogger pieces of news was Obama’s trip to Asia last month. It all started with this Michelle Bachmann’s interview on AC360:

And it all turned out to be complete bullshit spread by those talk radio guys that for some reason have millions of listeners. That piece on AC360 actually generated comments on the NY Times, basically saying good job for the fact-checking.

It’s unbelievable that now pieces on good reporting are not given to Watergate-like articles or war stories, but to reports that straighten out fake/not fact-checked ones.