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[Note: if you can’t take a “fact-based opinion piece” for what it is, skip to another rant… *heh*]
I get mailouts from Newsmax alla time. I don’t know what I clicked on or “signed” to get on their emailouts, but it’s an inbox flood of highly-slanted (though sometimes interesting) right-wing (though rarely truly conservative) pseudo-news.
Hey! Don’t get me wrong, here. It’s usually much, much less slanted and less poisonous than the typical Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind dreck, but so obviously and thoughtlessly slanted that it’s not a marked improvement over left wingnut Mass Media Podpeople cant.
But, still… *sigh* OK, here’s a very minor example that appeared in my inbox this a.m. dealing with the very real persecution of Christians in Muslim societies/countries. Just a snippet, and frankly most people would miss the objwectionable part–it’d just slide right on by. remember: this is just a lil bit picked up outa my mailbox; there’s tons more of this stuff where this bit of fluff came from:
The kidnapping of Christian teenage girls in Muslim nations has reached into the thousands. Many are forced through physical violence to convert to Islam. Other girls are often lured into becoming Muslims with promises of material wealth. The Voice of the Martyrs sponsors safe houses in Islamic countries to protect Christian teenage girls who have been threatened with or have escaped from abduction. These Christian refugees are also places where young women learn job skills and receive spiritual training.
Well, the first sentence and much of the following paragraph is strongly based in cold hard fact. But they do pad the books quite a bit with the sentence, “Other girls are often lured into becoming Muslims with promises of material wealth.” Come again? “Christian” girls lured into Islam with “promises of material wealth”? Can’t be done. If they’re induced by “promises of material wealth” to abjure Christianity in favor of Islam, then they weren’t “Christian girls” to begin with. Oh, they may have been born into putative (cultural or traditionally-oriented) “Christian” homes, but being born in a Christian home doesn’t make one a Christian any more than being born in a hostpital makes one a doctor.
Being a Christian requires faithfulness to Christ. And I hope you noticed I didn’t use the church formulation “faith in Christ” which, given both today’s pejoration of the word “faith” into some kind of mumbo-jumbo other-worldly unrealistic attachment to unprovable declarations and the bad translation of “tous” as dative rather than genetive in some very iffy translations of New Testament passages, I try to avoid at all times. No, a New testament “faith” means something far, far different to today’s general use of the term, something completely foreign to the obvious mindset of the Newsmax writer who wrote the paragraph quoted above.
And that’s another objection I have to Newsmax “reporting”—it’s as shallow as the left wingnut “news” offered by Mass Media Podpeople. Not only is it blatantly slanted (not in and of itself a bad thing, UNLESS the news organ claims objectivity and does not openly and transpatently reveal its bias) and at times disingenuous, it’s appealing to the lowest common denominator… from the viewpoint of reporters who seem not to e ven be aware of their shallowness.
Heck, I’m already dimwitted and shallow enough without being made stupider and shallower by reading bad news reporting/polemics. But, still, I skim about a third of the Newsmax emails I recieve and occasionally find enough to be able to dig deeper and find the real story. Usually, a simple google will turn up enough to make of the slanted, poisoned cotton-candy fluff of a Newsmax piece something useful.
In contrast, Townhall.com has better material by far: better reporting, commentary and just information in general. And as far as I’ve seen, it’s all openly opinionated, obviously proclaiming its point of view up front, not pretending to be an “objective” news organ. Sure, it’s columnists expressing viewpoints on things usually featured elsewhere in Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind cant, but the information is usually quite reliable and the viewpoint isn’t hidden.
And the views expressed there are generally more literate and well-thought-out (I said “generally”–I know of exceptions) than the yellow journalism at Newsmax.
Still , I have found that my time is better served cruising blogs looking for opinion pieces that point me to news I can examine and then think about on my own. The good thing about gathering my news this way is that I almost always have an OPENLY- and TRANSPARENTLY-DECLARED viewpoint presenting the news bitlet as a springboard for my own exploration of the topic, instead of some lying S.O.B. presenting the bitlet with a claim of “journalistic objectivity” or some such. How refreshing after a lifetime of combating followers of Uncle Walter’s lying meme of journalistic objectivity and trustworthiness.
Yes, the link above is to a blogpost that partially details the facts refuting Cronkite’s lies about the Tet Offensive… lies he sold the American public based on his “trustworthiness” as a reporter. But, hey, anyone with an internet connection can refute the lies the media told about Vietnam “back in the day” just as easily as they can refute the lies told about Iraq today. But so few do, because Uncle Walter, liar, American traitor and his ilk, were instrumental in changing American journalism–and the American ethos, down to this day.
And that, at last, is why I find “news” organs like Newsmax distasteful: they are simply mimicking, from a right wingnut (but not genuinely conservative) standpoint, the unethical drivel from the left wingnut (but certainly not genuinely liberal) standpoint of the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind.
And opposition to the unethical drivel from the left wingnut views of the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind should be better than that.
OK, I’ve certainly rambled long enough.
[One observation: you do know the difference between a right wingnut and a left wingnut, don’t you? Thimk! “righty-tighty/lefty-loosey”. *heh* That’s right. The left wingnuts are all loose. In fact, they’ve lost a few nuts n bolts cos they’ve been loose so long, they’ve come loose from reality itself. (Think, Algore and Jean Fraud Kerry.) That’s why they’ve become a “reality-based” community. All their fantasies are very, very loosely based in reality. Right wingnuts, on the other hand, can be screwed on a little too tightly. Tightly holding to reality is a good thing, but not so tightly that the nut cracks, the bolt is stripped, etc.]
7 Replies to “Newsmax, we have a problem…/OTP”