Thursday, April 03, 2008

Why Are Reporters So Bad?

You're probably thinking: "Are they?" Well, ymmv, but consider reports today (040308) about whistle blowers at the FAA concerning safety checks of 737 aircraft at Southwest Airlines and how a supervisor shut down an investigation/inspection then took a job at Southwest. Having had a father-in-law (now deceased) who was a commercial airline pilot (and one-time ALPA official) and used to rail against the FAA for being lax in standards enforcement and being well below international standards going back at least to the 60s, this news report about upcoming Congressional testimony was striking for being presented in an abstract stand alone fashion. The reporter either didn't know or chose to ignore a very long history of controversy about FAA inspections and possible corruption. In my former father-in-law's day it was common opinion among pilots that the FAA was in the industry's pocket. And this ignorance or dismissal of history and wider implications is common in reporting, as though journalists were all newborn babes in a de novo world.

Or consider the credit crunch. Paeans to 'moral hazard' all the while dismissing it but not digging into the obvious that the Federal Reserve is owned by commercial banks; ergo, almost by definition, not primarily interested in public welfare. Congressman Barney Frank orates about increasing scrutiny of the financial industry after he was instrumental in repealing Glass-Steagall that opened the door to this crisis. With rare exceptions, elected politicians are paid agents of capital and when, a few decades ago, capital decided it had to make money through job relocation, deindustrialization and finance, their legislators were only too willing to facilitate this. And finance has grown from its historical average of about 6% of the economy to 15%, an unsustainable level since finance is parasitical on real wealth creation in production. But the surfeit of news reports and analyses never gets into any of this. All they do is repeat the propaganda that officials and their lackeys spout about saving the economy through saving the investors. Which is peculiar since they also keep repeating that the economy is 70% propelled by consumer spending; thus, it would seem that it is the average consumer (otherwise known as debtor) that needs help, not hedge fund investors.

And sometimes it seems reporters aren't even capable of thought. On this past Sunday I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR when they presented the first of what they promised will be many interviews with "wealth creators," which I thought was a bit pretentious. And with whom was this first interview conducted? An auctioneer! (As the I Ching puts it: "Disaster at the beginning.") And not just any auctioneer but one who auctions off foreclosed mortgages on courthouse steps in northern Virginia (so they didn't have to travel far from their DC offices, gas being expensive). Anyone who knows anything about economics or cost accounting or industrial engineering also knows that auctioneers do not add value, do not create wealth, they only ride on the coattails of real wealth production (this being the point of trying to cut transaction costs in business). Or consider another NPR report a few days before that. (I don't mean to pick on only public radio but they do brag a lot about the breadth and depth of their coverage.) The story was about some low-dosage heroin in elementary schools in Texas that the reporter pronounced Cheez. He ended his piece noting use was dropping which I thought was odd in itself by saying "...though no longer so prevalent it is still rampant." The sentence being contradictory I surmised that the reporter must be young and that schools no longer require vocabulary study as they did in that other millenium when I grew up.

Or consider the continuing coverage of Kosovo and Nato expansion. Reporters never mention the UN resolution that says Kosovo is integral part of Serbia/Yugoslavia and must find its autonomy within that country or that international treaties prohibit breaking up countries thus denying their sovereignty. They never ask why does the Bush junta want to expand Nato up to Russia's border. For almost all reporters in all media neither the world nor the US has a history, let alone one that has an impact upon contemporary events. And never, never, never might rulers (at least of the US) have an unstated agendum. The major assault upon public education began with Reagan and his masters' goal of "defunding the left" through tax cuts for the wealthy along with large military spending increases. Which brings up another recent story about metropolitan public high schools graduating only half their students. For reporters the word 'context' is not in their lexicon and whatever press releases the Pentagon, White House or Wall Street hand out constitute factual reality. As in past days in the computer industry reporters merely re-word what private interests hand them and call that journalism. It's no wonder our world is in such a mess when those who inform us ignore and disregard 80% of the population and take their direction from the "decider." Broader knowledge and understanding are out there but it takes digging and thinking and few citizens will join an 'informed electorate' if they rely on mainstream journalism.

Reporters don't offer much information about employment either. If they looked they'd learn that willing workers without jobs are a multiple of the ludicrous 4+% official unemployment rate that counts a contingent temp laborer who works one day each week as employed. I once had a job that required reading trade mags and one of them, Modern Plastics had a monthly editorial - "Answering The Critics" - dealing with environmental concerns which always varied its tune but played the same melody (like the joke about Vivaldi who 'only wrote one song but wrote it 500 times') that plastic makes good landfill! So with economic trends where the mantra is how we all benefit from cheap Chinese-made products sold at Walmart. Reporters, and economists, never mention that if we all had good-paying permanent jobs we wouldn't need to shop at Walmart, a place where I've read that 40% of its employees qualify for some form of public economic assistance. We're in for a bumpy ride.