Things Consumed

 

A few words about interpreting our media and their lies

Over recent times this blog, my food-and-self-indulgence blog, has been a bit escapist. I've diverted more serious subjects that used to grace these pages to my Pro-Peace blog, which qualify as 'food for thought' and so could also be discussed here. So my chatter here will expand a bit to include the broader coverage it used to provide.

For example, media reform has been a hot topic for me for a while, and deserves mention here. The mainstream, corporate-owned media does a terrible job of keeping us informed, partly because they, how shall I put it, will print just about anything anyone in power tells them to print.

In the food world, it's pretty bad. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), plants and animals genetically manipulated to benefit the food producer (but not the consumer) are wildly unpopular here. About 60% of processed foods in America contain GMOs, but you'll have to read a specialty publication to learn that: the media don't want to inform consumers that their products contain items they may have objections to.

I've read articles stating that there is "no significant difference" between food grown with carcinogenic pesticides as compared to those grown without. In one article, when pressed to be more specific, a laboratory worker in charge of the research said the main difference was that the produce grown without pesticide had no measurable amounts of pesticides in the edible portions, whereas the pesticide-produced veggies did. Which is a significant difference to some of us, but most news simply repeats the producers' claims without that little follow-up fact.

Mad cow? You can only read about food safety when it's part of a short-term scandal. Your food is no safer this week than it was the last time your read about a food safety scandal, but such information is 'bad for business,' and profit is our national religion.

The organic movement, the return to chemical-free farming employing natural processes like composting and crop rotation, only makes it into the news as part of a business report (the organic market is booming), not as an important issue for our environmental health. You're not really supposed to know about how buying locally produced organic produce can benefit your envirornment and local economy. International agribusiness wouldn't benefit from you having such knowledge.

Foods to eat to keep you healthy? Good luck! You mom told you to eat your veggies, and while more research piled up in support of her advice daily, media companies don't want to alienate their junk-food advertisers by emphasizing nutrition too much. Fad diets are safe -- their creators tend to advertise. But nutrition and common sense don't have a budget, and so are happily drowned out in the pages and reports of advertising-funded news by junk science and food "trend" watching.

So I would encourage you to be skeptical about what you read about food, and what you may notice you don't read about food, in the media.

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You'll likewise need a lot of skepticism in an election year of political reporting. The current U.S. regime has figured out that there are almost no fact checkers allowed to examine your political statements in the rush to quote them in the press, and have had a field day twisting reality. I don't often quote from Slate, but the news I'd heard on this topic was beginning to affect my appetite, so here's a link to John Kerry's Defense Defense - Setting his voting record straight. By Fred Kaplan (slate.msn.com). It's worth reading the whole article, but here's a sample about all the alleged weapons programs that Kerry supposedly voted against. (bold emphasis mine)

In other words, Kerry was one of 16 senators (including five Republicans) to vote against a defense appropriations bill 14 years ago. He was also one of an unspecified number of senators to vote against a conference report on a defense bill nine years ago. The RNC takes these facts and extrapolates from them that he voted against a dozen weapons systems that were in those bills.The Republicans could have claimed, with equal logic, that Kerry voted to abolish the entire U.S. armed forces, but that might have raised suspicions. Claiming that he opposed a list of specific weapons systems has an air of plausibility. On close examination, though, it reeks of rank dishonesty.

Another bit of dishonesty is RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie's claim, at a news conference today, that in 1995, Kerry voted to cut $1.5 billion from the intelligence budget. John Pike, who runs the invaluable globalsecurity.org Web site, told me what that cut was about: The Air Force's National Reconnaissance Office had appropriated that much money to operate a spy satellite that, as things turned out, it never launched. So the Senate passed an amendment rescinding the money -- not to cancel a program, but to get a refund on a program that the NRO had canceled. Kerry voted for the amendment, as did a majority of his colleagues.

The lying and fact twisting exposed here is regularly quoted without question in the papers and TV shows. Even if a headline is eventually exposed as false -- the photos of the Saddam Hussein statue being pulled down by Iraqis was staged by the U.S. Army, the Army has now admitted, for example -- the correction will be buried so deep in the paper or broadcast so late at night that you'll never learn what really happened.

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The jokes about how you don't really want to know how law or sausages are made is pretty accurate. It wouldn't surprise me if certain political parties didn't insert the phrase "Mom and Apple Pie" into a bill to cut federal medical funds to severely handicapped children while giving cash for Ken Lay's lawn maintenance, and then after the other party votes against the horrific bill, rant about how that party is "against Mom and Apple Pie."

It's dishonest.

It's incompetent and dishonest that the mainstream media is so busy playing stenographers to power that they'd report that the 'opposition' party was against Mom and Apple Pie without even bothering to find out if it was dimly based on fact.

So, kudos to this author at Slate. And kudos to those of you paying attention to the actual world, as opposed to political fantasy land where the media and politicians exist.

(In their fantasy land, they claim it makes sense that only multi-millionaire Caucasian men who don't share my values (or perhaps don't have any) can run my government, give themselves tax cuts while shifting the tax burden for all public services to me, make fundamental decisions about my reproductive health without my consent or any medical knowledge, attempt to regulate personal relationships, fail to protect us from their past poor decisions abroad, and spend us into debt and recession, all while claiming to hate big government...)

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For more info, see my media manipulation and reform links.
posted by Arlene (Beth)1:36 PM

Saturday, September 04, 2004