Wednesday, April 20, 2011

have not blogged for a while

But, something heard on NPR this morning has my blood boiling again.

It's, as always, yet another case of 'missed opportunity'. To give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps their strategy is to present idiots without comment, assuming that the audience is smart enough to reach the conclusion I reached.

You know what I mean.

They were interviewing students who had attended Obama's recent public speech, asking them what they thought. Two of these budding scholars commented along the lines of "I was hoping he'd do something about gas prices and I was disappointed."

Um, students: the high gas prices are caused by many long-term and short-term forces, very few of which the POTUS has (or should have) the power to control. What an opportunity for NPR to remind us about:

1) Peak Oil
2) major political instability
3) the normal supply issues this time of year, when formulations are changing at the refineries
4) speculators driving up the cost hoping for windfall profits
5) oil companies making windfall profits
6) etc. etc. etc.

Last night on the NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams soberly reported the latest Obama popularity poll fall, which, IMHO, is largely due to ignorant people thinking that "he's not doing enough to bring gas prices down."

Rinse and repeat.

I suppose our species is doomed to always seeing only a very narrow view of what is a much Bigger Picture, but somehow I thought that Media would, rather than presenting what people believe without comment, explain why things are the way they are.

Wait a minute, this is exactly what Rush, Hannity, etc do do (and I mean that literally).

No comments:

Post a Comment