Normally, I avoid getting my news from television. The very format means they can only deliver a brief summary, pretty much devoid of nuance, and can’t even come close to covering the whole range of issues going on in the world. So, I get my news from the internet. I’m well aware that there’s a lot of bullshit there, that you can’t click on stuff from Breitbart or The Daily Caller, that sites that end in .com.co are just peddling straight up whoppers, that the Waterford Whisperer and Andy Borowitz of the New Yorker are intended as comedy, and that everybody commenting on Facebook has an agenda. Still, for better or worse, Facebook is usually where I go.
Today, I wanted a bit more detail on the stampede in Mumbai and all I’d seen on Facebook were ‘I stand with Mumbai’ type posts. A noble sentiment, but not very informative. So, I watched a bit of BBC, and a bit of CNN, and was reinforced in my view that TV is part of the problem.
There was Trump saying “As to the death toll in Puerto Rico, I think we’re doing an excellent job,” which is the kind of garbled stupidspeak that, coming from any other politician would be counted as a major gaffe, but reporters just kept shouting questions, as if bragging about how many people had died was normal.
Then, they were talking with somebody from the Spanish government about the pro-independence referendum in Catalonia, and he was talking about how ‘fake news’ had influenced the election. Politicians around the world have seen that this line works for everything, and so they’re jumping on the bandwagon.
On that topic, though, I don’t even see why the Spanish government is fighting it. If there’s a separate Catalonian state, and they remain in the EU, Spain loses nothing. That’s the beauty of the EU.
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