Curmudgeon's Corner
cur-mud-geon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
Imagine My Joy...
You have no doubt seen the Just Sayin’ blog that has been featured on the Germantown Now site for the past several weeks. I welcomed Mr. Adair as a new fellow blogger off-line, and he told me that I’d probably find his writings a bit more on the liberal side of issues than are mine.
He told me the truth and has written some very interesting and, I think, well-crafted pieces. I must admit that he gets my juices flowing, and it is apparent that he does that for many others given the comments that he provokes. So, out in the open: Welcome to the blogosphere, Paul.
The, as this is written, current piece on Just Sayin’ deals with the Fox news network and one’s seeming inability to escape it no matter where he or she is whether it be restaurants, airports, or many other locations. That caused me to reflect. I recall that the last really unbiased, in my sense of that word, news person was Edward R. Murrow; a name that many of you can only pull up from your ancient history brain sector.
The successors were people like Tom Brokaw who tried to appear to have no opinion but who failed off and on it that effort. Then there were the string of others that populated programming originators such as CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC. While on that point, CNN was the inescapable media outlet extraordinaire for many years as I was touring airports around the country on business trips. There simply was no alternative but I watched it to gather the latest news reports while sort of ignoring the bias that was present from time-to-time, given the subtle slant applied so that we wouldn’t notice but would have it in our subconscious nonetheless.
Those same media outlets were very good at developing shows, other than news, that also continued the more liberal theme but in less subtle ways than the supposedly ‘balanced’ news reports.
Imagine my joy when Fox news appeared on the scene. I then had an alternative source for what I believed to be unbiased news reporting. That opinion might well be shaded by my political beliefs just as the opinions expressed elsewhere are emblematic of the belief systems of those writers.
Underlying this is what I sense is a decided lack of equal respect for the opinions of others that is displayed by commenters on my blog as well as on Just Sayin’. Too often the bombast moves from 0 to 100 miles per hour in the first second or two. The use of descriptive terms that are often, I believe, intentionally demeaning, cause both sides in such arguments to lose standing. The back-and-forth that could help to flesh out the opinions written about in the main piece become flak that we try to read around and avoid versus something having merit sufficient to draw us into careful consideration of that perspective.
Commenters who echo the talking points of the day without trying to think through the issues for themselves are displaying ignorance which could be avoided with a bit more serious thought rather than the reflexive approach to slash and burn.
Maybe we’ll all mellow over time…but that hasn’t been an apparent trend to this moment.
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