Burying Our Heads In The Sand

By James Donahue

We don’t know if anybody else has noticed it, but our media outlets have been devoid of the real news for a very long time.

We have been so preoccupied by the media’s constant “milking” of certain events it seems as if there is little, if any information publicized about things that we really need to know about.

Think about it. For about two full years before the 2008 presidential election, almost all of our news involved the candidates, their battles for party nominations, and eventually all of the hoopla linked to the Democratic and then the Republican Party conventions. There was almost total concentration on such events as the Scott Peterson murder trial, the drama involving the fate of a brain-damaged Terri Schiavo, the passing of Pope John Paul II, the selection of his successor, a countless number of abducted and murdered children, and most recently the Michael Jackson death, the Jaycee Lee Dugard abduction, and death of Senator Edward Kennedy.

Yes, the media did take time off to cover such astounding events as Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans, the global economic disaster, the Bush imposed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a few other disasters too massive to ignore.

In the meantime, many of the important events of our time are passing completely unnoticed . . . at least by our media.

We are barely covering the shift of emphasis in our war from Iraq to Afghanistan, where guerilla warfare rages daily and our soldiers continue to get picked off one or two at a time. We have jumped from the frying pan into the fire with war costs skyrocketing and with no exit strategy in sight.

The media is ignoring the fact that 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries recently published a detailed assessment of the “state of the world” in which they agreed that the planet’s environment is degrading to a point where human extinction is a very real threat. They also find that global warming appears to be out of control and that no matter what we do, the continual heating of the planet cannot be stopped.

There was almost no word on all of the ways that the Bush Administration was stripping our nation’s legislated environmental controls on business and industry, and preparing to allow oil and gas well drilling in pristine wilderness places that have been protected for years. Fortunately President Barack Obama has put the brakes on some of this foolishness since taking office in January.

Global warming not only is proven real, it is hosting violent weather events that are devastating homes and property and leaving hundreds if not thousands of people dead and maimed in their wake. Also coming at us are a number of new and modified bacteria and viruses fed by the warmer temperatures. Some, like the new variant of the “swine flu,” threaten mankind with what some scientists fear may be killer pandemics.

With the current economic crisis, we have a record number of people out of work and losing their homes. Tent cities are appearing all over the nation because people have no other place to go. Even those who still have jobs, now lack health insurance and cannot afford adequate health care. Yet bankers, lawyers and other people in high-paying positions are gleaning massive salaries. The gap between the nation’s poor and the wealthy is growing ever wider.   

I get the feeling that someone, possibly our elected political leadership and even the sold-out media, are going out of their way to ignore the inevitable. The world is in a very bad mess and our news is being coddled so that the masses are neither aware, nor are they thinking about what is about to come down on our heads.

Thus our nightly news has become an entertainment hour, filled with talking heads and colorful displays of over-dramatized non-news events that become the focal point of the masses.

Like a popular football, basketball or soccer team, the burial of a dead senator and selection of a successor becomes a form of reality drama on our television screens. We can see the casket paraded past the camera lens. We watch the facial expressions as Michael Jackson’s private doctor is accused of murdering the singer by supplying him narcotics on demand. We listen intently as Larry King and his ilk explore all of the terrible details of the Dugard abduction case.

It is all designed to take our minds off the real menace…..the events looming in our own pitiful lives.