'NEWS AND TRUTH ARE NOT THE SAME THING'

News and truth are not the same things. News, at least as it is configured in the faux objectivity of American journalism can be used quite effectively to mask and obscure the truth. ‘Balance,’ in which you have to give as much space, for example, to the victimizer as to the victim, may be objective and impartial, but it is usually not honest. And when you are ‘objective,’ it means that, in your reasonableness, you ultimately embrace and defend the status quo. There is a deep current of cynicism that runs through much of American journalism, especially on commercial electronic media. It is safe and painless to produce ‘balanced’ news. It is very unsafe, as the best of journalists will tell you, to produce truth. The great journalists, like the great preachers, care deeply about truth, which they seek to impart to their reader, listener or viewer, often at the cost to their careers.
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My former employer, the New York Times, with some of the most able and talented journalists and editors in the country, not only propagated the lies used to justify the war in Iraq, but also never saw the financial meltdown coming. These journalists and editors are besotted with their access to the powerful. They look at themselves as players, part of the inside elite. They went to the same elite colleges. They eat at the same restaurants. They go to the same parties and dinners. They live in the same exclusive neighbourhoods. Their children go to the same schools. They are, if one concedes that propaganda is a vital tool for the power elite, important to the system. Journalists who should have been exposing the lies used to justify the Iraq war or reporting from low-income neighbourhoods- where mortgage brokers and banks were filing fraudulent loan applications to hand money to people they knew could never pay it back- were instead ‘doing’ lunch with the power brokers in the White House or on Wall Street. All that talent, all that money, all that expertise, all those resources proved useless when it came time to examine the two major cataclysmic events of our age. And all that news, however objective and balanced turned out to be a lie.

The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress by Chris Hedges, pp xi and xii.

Thanks to David@Montreal for sending me the quotes from the book, which I have not yet read, but which I intend to read.

I well remember Judith Miller's front page articles during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in the New York Times on the supposed WMD in the country obtained from her Iraqi 'source', Ahmad Chalabi, who was later proved to be lying. Oops!

Brave reporters like Walter Pincus of the Washington Post wrote articles questioning the information on WMD in Iraq but received only back-page coverage.

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.
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An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces.

Of course, Judith Miller's stories ran on page 1 of the NYT with large headlines. Who you gonna believe? In these times of 'balanced news', you believe what you want to believe. In seeking to provide 'balance' the reporters give equal weight to spurious nonsense and the truth of a situation in order not to appear to be leaning to one side or the other, despite the fact that, at times, there is no sensible other side. And we are left with Stephen Colbert's 'truthiness'.

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STILL WORKING IN YOUR 70s AND 80s?

From the Wall Street Journal:

We all think it’s a panacea. If you don’t have enough money saved for retirement, you’ve got a few ways to close the gap between what you have and what you need in your nest egg: Save more, invest more aggressively, and/or work longer.

Well, it turns out that working longer is indeed an option, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute latest study. The only problem is that the latest research shows that you’ll have to work much longer than you anticipated. In fact, many Americans will have to keep on working well into their 70s and 80s to afford retirement, according to the study, titled “The Impact of Deferring Retirement Age on Retirement Income Adequacy.”

What’s more, it’s even worse for low-income workers, according Jack VanDerhei, one of the co-authors of the study. Those who earned (on average over the course of their careers) less than $11,700 per year, the lowest income quartile, would need to defer retirement till age 84 before 90% of those households would have just a 50% chance of affording retirement.

We are blessed that Grandpère has a good pension, since I took 12 years off from the workplace while my children were young. Although I started working part-time at the age of 16, my wages were quite low. When I finished college and graduate school, I earned a small salary compared to today's wages. And even after I went back to work as my children grew older, I never made a great deal of money. Thus, my Social Security income computed from the average of my wages over the years is low enough that I'd be eligible for public assistance, if I were not married to Grandpère. My marriage saves me from poverty.

Some folks never want to quit working, and that's fine for them, but most of us get tired. What of the workers who do hard physical labor, whose bodies wear out, and they lose the ability to do the work?

All but the wealthy face a very different situation today. I most certainly would make different choices from staying out of the workforce for 12 years, and I'd have paid more attention to striving up the ladder of success in order to earn more money.

How brilliant of me to latch on to Grandpère and hang on to him for what will soon be 50 years. As I looked for a good YouTube version of Maurice Chevalier singing "I'm So Glad That I'm Not Young Anymore", I found the song below, which I like better, because it's all about me.




So I went from serious to silly in my post. So sue me.