Blair v Tillman

I am a football fan. Pretty much every day I check out my favorite team’s site, NFL.com, and a few other sources about football. I think it really is too bad that the military withheld information about Pat Tillman’s death. However, I think that it is an even bigger problem that on the front page of CNN.com the first thing you see is Pat Tillman in uniform, but that you have to scroll down in order to see anything about the elections in Britain.

These are significant elections for the world folks. The UK is a member country of G8, they are Permanent members of the United Nation’s Security council. Hell, they are progenitors of the framers of the U.S. Constitution. This elections is globally significance, and even more so to the United States. While Pat Tillman’s death is unfortunate, and the new information surrounding it doesn’t look favorably upon the US military, it is not as newsworthy as the elections in the UK.

Here is part of the problem. The news in the news isn’t news anymore, its advertising, sprinkled with facts (and fictions) in order to sell market shares. New organizations are capitalist enterprises, and inasmuch are out to make a buck. News shouldn’t be what sells, it should be what is.

Gore and Current

Al Gore with a cable network? I wonder what McChesney and Nichols have to say about this? By checking out the Current website www.current.tv, you will find fashionable youthful parlance sprinkled throughout, include those incredibly annoying chatting phrases. The Nation suggest that this new channel will be an graduate student version of MTV, while I am not exactly sure what is meant by that, I hope that it is not the case. We don’t need another channel that is like MTV.

While I am dubious about its departure from contemporary media, I am hopeful. Gore has said that this will not be the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, and I sure hope that is the case. I would like to see something that is truly challenging of contemporary media, but Gore has given us no reason to believe this will happen.

The ascertain is that the network needs to be modeled into a format that young people will like (which is code for already works), and that a departure from this method will prevent getting the message across. But Allah please, we don’t need anymore reality shows. Do people really like these, or do they just watch them because they are hyped so much? If I were a network I would hype them too, no actors to pay, no fancy sets to build. Its just money, money, and mo’ money.

I have digressed. Well… maybe not. Gore needs to have a network that is economically viable, or it will collapse. His wealthy buddies have tossed money into the coffers to get this bird of the ground, but their pockets certainly, like oil, are soon to dry up.

So here is to Current, and Mr. Al Gore. Hope you do something… in the mean time, turn on Jon Stewart, at least he saved of from the hell that was Crossfire.