You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Media’ tag.
This excerpt is from an article on Counterpunch titled “Treason”. It is on the rhetorical side and my eyes did roll when I saw that the author’s upcoming book to be released was called ‘Zen Economics’. But I liked this paragraph enough in his essay to share it with you my faithful readership because it succinctly illustrates the sad state that most of journalism is in.
“Likewise, there appears eternal mystery on the part of the compassionate right—liberals and progressives, why the corporate media are tools of corporate leaders and their servants in government. It is no accident Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jeffrey Toobin and David Gregory use the royal ‘we’ to conflate their interests as rich, connected, white ‘journalists’ with those of Mr. Obama and Ms. Feinstein. The received wisdom is ‘access’ to elite sources is behind the ‘affectation,’ but it is no affectation. The strategy to ‘universalize’ narrow interests through the use of totalizing language (‘we’) is class politics 101. These ‘journalists’ are responding to disclosure of class ‘secrets’ that threaten their privilege, not to acts against the public interest. (‘Access’ is to report what elites say, not what they do (a/k/a journalism) and these brave folk have a greater chance of dying from choking on Jell-O than from terrorist attacks).”
(ed. bolding mine)
Ideology can be a horrible thing. It sinks the brain in a rut, spitting out automatic responses with no regard to critical thought or empirical evidence. This results in a huge resistance to progress. “Change? No! We were right before, so your new option must be wrong! Actually consider the facts and implications? Nope, not interested.”
This sad fact is now rearing its ugly head in the arena of children’s sports, specifically, soccer. The Alberta Soccer Association is proposing to stop keeping score and tracking wins for children under 12. They tried to push this through earlier, but met with too much resistance from parents. Now, they are trying once more and I’m worried that they may fail to persuade the parents yet again.
So why is this being pushed and what are the concerns of parents? Before we look at the real answer, let’s check in with some commercial media. I’ll start with the pinnacle of mindless, reactionary, things-were-better-with-polio zealotry, The Sun.
“Will it result in coddled kids, less equipped to handle the pressures of winning and losing? Probably.
Will the lack of a score promote a culture of mediocrity, where some kids don’t bother to try, and where the best young athletes are dragged down to the level of the lowest denominator? Pretty much.”
Wow, all it needs is to suggest that this new no-score system will lead to socialism or nazism and it’s like we have our own Fox News. But surely, this troglodyte spewing out baseless claims is in the minority. Other mass media personalities will be at least moderately responsible about what comes out of their mouths and actually look into the issue before spouting ill-informed tripe, won’t they? Sure won’t.
Over in radio land, The Bear’s Yukon Jack, the station’s ranter for the everyman, made a Yap entitled “Sports are for Winning” where he posited that the reason behind the no score movement was ‘winning isn’t important’, declared it “nonsense”, then suggested that without winning, kids would have no reason to try or succeed. Of course, no justification was presented for any of this. But then, it’s pretty hard to present what doesn’t exist.
So what’s actually going on? It’s bigger than soccer. Some few articles will mention that this no-scoring for young children is starting in other sports as well. It’s bigger than that too. Sports Canada, the body dedicated to developing federal policies for Canadians to participate and excel in sports, is putting out a massive amount of programs and research dedicated to getting Canadians active for life. They are pushing for all sports to use the Long Term Athlete Development Model . Indeed, some sports have already implemented much of the LTAD model with great success. The mass of research, study, work, and data supporting the LTAD model is staggering. And guess what? Not only is keeping score not important at a young age, it’s harmful.
The load of moronic BS myth is that ‘without winning, children won’t be competitive or motivated to do well’.
LTAD recommends the removal of KEEPING score, not the removal of scoring. People who confuse the two are insulting the intelligence of children. Kids know full well when they kick the ball into the net, hit the ball with the bat, or run all the way to the end zone without being stopped, they’ve achieved. They will feel the rush of success, the thrill of triumph, and the burning desire to do it again. All the motivation, encouragement, and fun one could ask of sports, and no one loses.
In the simpler world of children, losing is failure, losing is being a bad player, losing isn’t fun, losing can be the end of the world. The message ‘you’re a loser’ being pounded into a young mind has disastrous consequences.
The first response to this point is usually something like ‘it builds character and perseverance’. No, for most kids that age, it doesn’t. What it builds is a dislike of sports and aversion to activity. “Why be active and be called a loser when I can play video games? At least video games are fun.” A huge part of the obesity problem we currently face is people are not active enough. Hardly surprising when old school “character building” is teaching kids that sports are for the few elite winners, not for fun.
The other response is ‘kids need to learn about losing, or they’ll be ill prepared for it later’. I can’t help but see claims like this as deliberately dense, as they are wrong on a couple of levels. One, learning to have fun playing sports is crucial to seeing what is really important, which will, ultimately, develop a healthy attitude towards losing when the child gets older. Two, ‘losing’ is ubiquitous in today’s society. It’s a part of almost all games, activities, and all kinds of social engagements. Taking losing out of sports won’t suddenly make ‘losing’ a surprise.
Children need to learn to have fun playing sports, or you end up with a huge chunk of the population who have all kinds of health problems associated with low levels of activity. Once the love of sports is built in, not only will you have a much more active population, training for high level competition is much more likely to happen later in life for a lot more people.
I point this out, not because it’s the way I was raised. Not because I identify with a group that feels this way. Because that’s what mountains of research has shown to be effective.
Just as they didn’t poll parents when they brought in child seat regulations, I feel it is inappropriate to decide whether to go ahead with LTAD based on what parents think. The information is available. Being willfully ignorant of it to the detriment of children is neglectful and borderline abusive. It should not be an option. Not to say that the LTAD model is perfect. There is still lots to work out in terms of ideal implementation. And I definitely am not denying the possibility of improvement, but hashing out these details is not the discussion that’s being had.
Society should always want better for their children. Improvement of this kind demands we move beyond the ‘it-was-good-enough-for-me’ mentality. This would be expedited significantly if media personalities would actually do a bit of research, speak honestly, and not automatically resort to the traditonal-bootlicking, comfortzone-pandering, misinformation-spreading, ignorance-enabling clap trap that currently pollutes our culture.
Links:
Coming to work today I was listening to the CBC morning news there was the usual doom and gloom, but what was remarkable was the amount of time devoted to telling Canadians about how awesome the commercials were going to be for the Superbowl and the lengths people were going to get the American cable feeds to be able to watch the commercials.
To watch the commercials.
I think of the amount of creative energy expended to make a mere advertising and despair. The creative genius of our society is not only being flushed down the crapper, but smeared in an orgy of debauched garish technicolour into the cultivated passive brain boxes of eager consumers. Not citizens, not people in living in a vibrant culture, not enabled beings in a swirling maw of democratic give and take. Nothing like that.
Nothing like that at all.
People wonder why stunning masterworks are not frequently made anymore. Looking at the fetid mess that is commercial culture is not a bad place to start. Does anyone, while growing up say, “Wow, I think I can realize my potential in the wonderful world of Advertising!” The creative genius being cravenly abused in the pursuit of profit is emblematic of what is wrong with our culture.
Imagine, if just for second, if we made the choice to channel our creative forces back into meaningful pursuits. What if we valued art, music and literature as much as we value the tawdry glorification of consumer culture. How many Klimts would be painting? How many Beethovens would be composing? How many Jane Austins would be writing? How much many more cultural epochs would we have reached by now if not for hollow banality of consumer culture?
Humanity’s grand claim for the 21st century should not be “perfecting the exploitation of everything for the short sighted benefit of the few”. It is shit; and irredeemably so.
Orwell day was January 21st, and of course, I missed it. Media Lens did not miss the boat and has an article up laced with the sort of irony and breathtaking self-deception that Orwell fought against.
“January 21, ‘Orwell Day’, marked the 63rd anniversary of George Orwell’s death, Steven Poole notes in the Guardian. To commemorate 110 years since Orwell was born (June 25), BBC radio will broadcast a series about his life while Penguin will publish a new edition of his essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’. This essay, Poole comments, is Orwell’s ‘most famous shorter work, and probably the most wildly overrated of any of his writings’.
Why ‘wildly overrated’?
‘Much of it is the kind of nonsense screed against linguistic pet hates that anyone today might compose in a green-text email to the newspapers.’
The essay’s ‘assault on political euphemism’, it seems, ‘is righteous but limited’, while its more general attacks ‘on what he perceives to be bad style are often outright ridiculous, parading a comically arbitrary collection of intolerances’.
This is strong stuff indeed. Was one of Orwell’s most highly-regarded essays really about venting ‘linguistic pet hates’? The answer is in the essay. Orwell noted that the writing he admired was generally provided by ‘some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line”. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style’.
As for the mainstream productions of his day – the ‘pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos’:
‘one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them’.
This typically dramatic and disturbing passage makes clear that Orwell was not focusing on ‘linguistic pet hates’. Rather, he was motivated to resist a process of social dehumanisation facilitated by ‘imitative’ and ‘lifeless’ communication, by a toxic ‘orthodoxy’. He underlined his reasoning:
‘I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.’
If this was a crucial issue in Orwell’s time, it is even more so today.”
[…]
Follow the link and read the rest of the article. If it doesn’t inspire you to triangulate your news reading, I’m not sure what will.
Education has come to a new low. We are now teaching SOCIALISM !!!1!1!! to children via (the devil’s ken) algebra… of all things. From the Raw Story:
“But even worse is the way some textbooks are pushing the liberal agenda,” the Fox News host explained, pointing to an algebra worksheet that Scholastic says gives students “[i]nsight into the distributive property as it applies to multiplication.”
“Distribute the wealth!” Bolling exclaimed, reading the worksheet. “Distribute the wealth with the lovely rich girl with a big ole bag of money, handing some money out.”
Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle explained that the algebra worksheet had put her on “high alert” for the liberal agenda in her 6-year-old son’s curriculum.”
Distributive Property we are watching you!!!
“Everybody has anecdotal evidence of this,” co-host Greg Gutfeld agreed. “I think the only way leftism can survive is through indoctrination because its number one adversary is reality. So you got to get them young and it’s perfect for kids. Paul Krugman’s logic is child’s play: Share your stuff… A lot of this comes from the teachers. They get their news from The Huffington Post and their antiperspirant from a health food store. This is the way they live.”
If you have a couple minutes (and want to break your brain) I suggest you go over to Raw Story and watch the video of the Fuax News idiots doing what they do best…
I think Fox News sometimes tries really hard to be of use to the American public, but that urge, once realized, is quickly woven into partisan propaganda. Liberal Viewer brings to light what the ALCU is doing against the unlawful surveillance of its citizenry.
As a Canadian, I realize we are just a couple of months behind the legislative cycle, thus this sort of Big Brother stuff is slated for Canada as well.
The red pen of justice is wiggling, but I’ve run out of time. We’ll make do with this rage building infographic while I see if I can scrape some time together during the week to compose the piece that is swirling in my brain.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…