Posted on 03/14/2006 2:50:09 PM PST by SirLinksalot
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Posted: March 14, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
If you want to know what happened today, you don't have to turn on the tube. I will be happy to tell you right now, no extra charge.
Ready? Here goes: What happened today is about what happened yesterday. And the day before. Namely:
Four billion people went to work or took care of their kids. They cooked food, paid bills, washed clothes, handled problems, had a few laughs, did most of their chores, and got enough sleep to face tomorrow.
That's the stuff of real life. But don't expect your favorite news anchor to report something so majorly boring.
Instead, you will be told that a house burned down, a kid was abducted, Congress is working on yet another outrageous law, some deadly trend has been noticed, the Mets are in trouble, and the Jews and Arabs once again failed to see eye to eye.
The media have an agenda: They want to keep you nervous. Their ratings go up each time the world comes near The End. When their lead story is a pop star checking into rehab, you know they're having a bad day.
In a land where the average American child has seen 16,000 murders on television by age 18, truth and goodness are in Outer Snoresville. Violence and evil are more exciting. But when you finally turn off the television at midnight after the last Borg or Klingon has been vaporized and the last stocking-capped punk has been stabbed with his own knife and the last '74 Dodge has gone up in an orange fireball, you are left in the burnt-out silence to mourn with singer Peggy Lee: Is that all there is?
No, Peggy, there is far more – and there always was. As famed historians Will and Ariel Durant bravely admitted:
We must remind ourselves again that history as usually written ... is quite different from history as usually lived ... Behind the red facade of war and politics, misfortune and poverty, adultery and divorce, murder and suicide, were millions of orderly homes, devoted marriages, men and women kindly and affectionate, troubled and happy with children. Even in recorded history we find so many instances of goodness, even of nobility, that we can forgive, though not forget, the sins.
The gifts of charity have almost equaled the cruelties of battlefields and jails. How many times, even in our sketchy narratives, we have seen men helping one another – Farinelli providing for the children of Domenico Scarlatti, diverse people succoring young Haydn, Conte Litta paying for Johann Christian Bach's studies at Bologna, Joseph Black advancing money repeatedly to James Watt, Puchberg patiently lending and lending to Mozart. Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
Who indeed? Where are the historians and journalists who are chronicling our victory? History is more than what today's textbooks say.
Evangelical lodestar Philip Yancey realized that something was amiss when in 2004 he read a report claiming that, "little has changed since 1980. It reported that 80 percent of the world's people still live in substandard housing, 70 percent are unable to read, and 50 per cent suffer from malnutrition." (Thanks to the Internet, slop like this has achieved eternal life.)
So he dug up the real facts (Christianity Today, May 2004, Page 88):
* In just 30 years, illiteracy has plunged from 53 percent to 20 percent.
* Malnutrition has dropped from 50 percent to 20 percent.
* Only 25 percent, not 80 percent, have substandard housing now.
* Lack of clean water now afflicts 25 percent of the world – down from 75 percent.
* "Experts once forecast that world population would hit a high of 20 billion, causing an intolerable strain on Earth's resources. That prediction was lowered to 15 billion, then 11 billion, then 9 billion."
* "Thirty years ago, one in eight children died in their first year of life; now half that proportion dies."
* Leprosy has declined greatly, polio is almost gone, and smallpox, the dreaded killer of 500 million, has vanished from the planet.
* World per capita income is up 60 percent while extreme poverty has fallen almost in half.
* In the United States, the teenage birth rate has dropped 30 percent in 10 years.
* All in all, things in backward countries have improved more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500.
My thanks to Phil for reminding us that good is outrunning evil at flank speed. To his fine numbers, I've added a few of my own in my newest book, "The Meaning of Life," from which I've excerpted and adapted the above. It will be available in April.
Sure, we've got troubles, but the Big Picture is overwhelmingly positive.
News is a report of current recent events, involving previously unknown information. While the daily activities of human beings maybe real life, its not news. Daily life doesn't involve previously unknown events. The fact that most of mankind is better off today then they were 20 years ago, is a direct result of what the USA has accomplished in our history. Especially, in the 20th century.
The world as it is presented in the media does not even bear a remote resemblance to the everyday lives of the vast majority of people on this planet, most of whose time is spent in humdrum, and for the most part pleasant, pursuits. Let alone the wealthy, high tech societies; even in Third World countries, the people do not spend their days wallowing in abject misery. The overpaid reporters at the New York Times or CBS News are far more unhappy than the obscure Bedouin tribesmen or Botswana hut-dwellers I have had the pleasure to meet in my travels.
The real irony here is that the networks look for bad news and our local news stations and local paper refuse to. I feel like I live in Mayberry. No crime, no corruption, no coverage of city council/county commission meetings, nothing. We get 3 minutes of local stuff like fund raisers or UT basketball/football news, or regional news and feel good stuff. Then the local channels feel it necessary to show 7 minutes of national and international news (that one leaves me scratching my head). Apparently, local reporters have nothing to investigate so we get regurgitated ABC, CBS, NBC video.
Want to live in a crime-free city? Move to Knoxville (sarcasm)...the only stipulation is you have to be an ostrich and hide your head in the sand.
Journalism is the business of attracting attention by the use of topical nonfiction. So while most of life, for most people, is muddling through mundane problems and earning a living, in the artificial reality of journalism most of the discussion is about unusual - primarily unusually bad things.
A Russian once said that the difference between us and them was that Russians knew Pravda was propaganda, and Americans believed their media.......
I don't know a single person who watches ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, or C(X)NN. They are all biased to the extreme left and have lost too much credibility to be taken seriously.
Who do we all watch? "The Most Powerful Name in News, Fair and Balanced -- You Know It -- FOX News!"
I still stray now and then since FNC still doesn't always do real breaking news well.
MSM 'journalism' is the Matrix!
So true that the left tries to bury it. Excellent observation.
The grocery line tabloids have electronic equivalents in ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, PBS and friends. They share the same level of credibility.
If a Democrat were POTUS, the good news would be endless - the bad spiked.
"In Washington today, the facts really don't matter. And no one -- friend or foe -- has any doubt that the Bush administration has an appalling record when it comes to getting its message out and keeping Congress "in the loop." When political and press opponents of the president are allowed to frame the issue -- whether it's the war in Iraq, the response to a hurricane, NSA "wiretaps" or foreign firms operating U.S. port facilities -- the results are foreordained."
~ Ollie North ~
BTTT
*PING*
Was that ping intended for someone else?
"If they were to fire off their collection of airheaded bimbos, and replace them with people who can delve into important issues in a rational convincing way, then they can once again establish a niche for themselves."
It's not even that which bothers me. CNN's international "multi-culti apologist stance for Islamic terrorism" garbage is what irks me most. They have completely snubbed the UNC-CH Islamic terror attack, as they have snubbed many positive steps taken in Iraq.
It goes further back than their considerably fascist response to the "Mohammed Bomb Turban" cartoon. Their continuous demoralizing reports give aid and comfort to the fascists we are fighting.
The anti-American CNN machine will never regain viewer interest, and justifiably so; They betrayed US viewers in support of our enemies.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Those bastards in the MSM were so incredibly negative on 9/11/2201, focusing on the two skyscrapers that fell instead of the thousands that didn't. Didn't the Sears Tower and the Empire State deserve coverage for not being on fire and not seeing thousands die?
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