Article: Dumbing America Down

Jim VandeHei of Politico.com, you know, that brassy “all politics, all the time” internet site that has all the “bright” young stars that left their homes at WaPo and The Grey Lady to strike out on their own (with CBS’s underwriting of course) to change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel with their bare hands, said on “Face the Nation” today that “Americans outside the beltway really don’t care much about this Attorneygate thing”. Well thank you Mr. VanderHei with your extensive experience in politics that absolutely dwarfs mine, how could I ever suspect that Americans might care? Am I just engaging in wishful thinking again, or AM I TIRED OF THE MSM TELLING ME WHAT THE HELL WE ARE INTERESTED IN?

You have some nerve sitting pompously in that chair making believe you have some kind of inside track to what Americans care about. This is one reason you should give back the money that CBS invested in you! You are just plain wrong. Wrong and ignorant of what Americans DO care about. Why should I expect you to know anyway? You must have still been in grade school when I retired from the Army. Fact is son, this is the kind of thing that got Nixon a one-way ticket out of Dodge. Then again, how would you know?

It’s not the fawning kids at Politico.com that has me in this uproar, it’s the MSM in general. I have been timing the world news on CBS from 6:30 to 7:00 PM. They usually go for about 12 minutes before they get into features and fluff. The hard news lasts for 12 minutes. Take away the commercial breaks and you get seven minutes of world news. SEVEN MINUTES! Even CNN has a 20 minute loop that repeats over and over. This world has more news than that!

What does Mr. VanderHei think should happen? He works for CBS. Why doesn’t he ask the people at the News department to add another 10 minutes of news? Gee, ten more minutes of news. I bet that would just be too hard. Anyway, the American people can’t handle that much news. It will get them all confused, and golly, we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?

The sick fact behind all of this, is that the Mainstream Media, with all it’s bells and whistles, is doing it’s level best to dumb America down. The major networks do not work in the peoples best interests anymore. They give a paltry average of 12 minutes to National and world News. What is a person to do? What can we do to try to make sure that our fellow Americans are really getting the lowdown on what’s been going on in their name in Washington? How can we convince the MSM to stop with the American Idols and Survivor long enough so that people in this nation get to know what’s going on? Think it’s impossible? It’s not. Come to think about it, they pledge to do exactly that when they get their license to broadcast from the FCC. They promise to give so much time for Public Service Announcements and Local and World News. Maybe it’s about time the FCC started to actually insist on more PSA’s and News for the public.

So why aren’t they doing it? The same reason why most of the MSM outlets like the Newspapers and the radio don’t. It doesn’t make too much money for them when the corporate boys buy air time for the junk and services they want to sell. It’s not that people won’t really watch the news, they will, corporate America just doesn’t want to fund it. The dumber they keep us, the easier it is to control us. Welcome to this Brave New World you read about when you were a teenager. Just keep the people fat, happy and stupid. That way they just spend money and don’t act up. It’s the same with our schools. Dumb them down too. I work at a college, in fact I’ve been working at colleges since 2002. I have met people in college, getting by on student loans, that are paying upwards of $175.00 dollars for a textbook, and they can’t even read! Go figure. They can get to level 10 on HALO, but they can’t read. The parents are working two jobs just to pay the mortgage, the loan and gas for their SUV, and their credit cards minimum payment, so how would they know that Shawn or Trevor can’t read?

We are in bad need of an overhaul. Either we fix this system, or in twenty years, we will have thrown away any hope of righting the wrongs that are drowning this country in ignorance and stupidity. I’ll probably be dead in twenty years, but many of you that are reading this might not be. We need some serious thought provoking discussion about where we are going. The teachers are barely doing their jobs, the parents are too damn busy to parent, the MSM is too busy trying to make a buck off the corporate world that wants us stupid, and everything is falling apart from within. This is what we face. What are you going to do about it? It has to start somewhere.