Who would like George Bush tried for War crimes?

[Gandalf]

Nonsense, people need to counter the lapdog approach of the media when it comes to events of this magnitude. The US media simply lapped up the pre war war drums coming from the government and failed to apply any sense of accountablity for the way they were blatantly manipulating public sentiment.

The US public was largely in favour of the Iraq war because of deception and outright propaganda. If you notice in Europe sentiment was quite different. That is because European media generally displays far more responsibility for the words it is printing. That's not to say that there were no war drums, but the better publications echoed FAR more caution. You also don't have pro Israel bias all over the place which is another thing that irks me with the US.

But of course, you would like to escape the fact that you have propaganda for news and would instead like to blame 'revisionism'. Fair enough.

The news is kind of similar to the way history is being taught in schools....it's wrong. It's full of spin half truths and outright lies and NO I'm not singling out Fox or anyone else I'm saying news in general be it in the US or England or South Korea is produced in a manner where it will spin stories one way or another and there is usually a lot more OPINION involved in news these days than just the plain old facts and rightfully so, the people (once again in general) are too fucking stupid to question it.

I use my example again of what people are taught about historical figures like Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. or even George Washington. I use those figures because they are treated as sinless dieties, gods on Earth when each of them had major failings (professionally and personally) in their lives. Learning that wouldn't take away the luster of the good they did but the TRUTH is the truth, the LEGEND is just a legend and I am more interested in what actually happened.

I think that history in schools is taught wrongly and I would argue even in many undergraduate faculties too. I have studied the subject in both the school system and the university system and have come to reject a lot of what I was ever taught. Not all, events do indeed take place in history, but it's the slant that is given that distorts. Instead of being given access to both sides of the picture, one side is typically pushed ahead of the other. I think a lot of people go into fields such as journalism through their achievements on such courses, others go into politics and already their ideological mindset has been made up. Others like me end up on the other side of the world teaching English having rejected it all and on the way discover sources that finally begin to make some sense. I am far more politically aware than I ever was as an undergraduate student and that to me is the ultimate failing of the system, but maybe to the system itself, and the way it accomodates so many others, that is its strength. It could also be that I have changed myself and that has it's part to play too. But those people going into journalism, they have already been programmed to play 'the good journalist'. University papers have taught them to follow the rules, to kowtow to the editors wishes in the form of exam questions that expect certain answers, to understand how the paper is funded and to know where your degree came from etc. And what you get is the poor excuse for a media we have.

Having said that I do think the UK has a couple of excellent newspapers. The Independant is the one that stands above all others for me. It's not perfect, but it can be very good. The weekend Observer is another very good paper. Where some of these journalists come from, I cannot say. But none of these people suffered my education, or if they did they responded like warriors. As for the America media, I don't only refer to Fox when I talk about the low quality propaganda. It is almost uniform. South Korea is quite similar to America in this regard. The quality of the media is dismal and the people that read it are overwhelmingly sheeple. People here rarely even buy a paper. They read it online in stories that are typically several paragraphs long and where sentences don't even follow contextual patterns. But not all media is like that. The BBC is pretty good as an online source.

I see nothing wrong with opinions, but none of the news I read is largely made up of opinions. If the news is cutting the news and heading straight for more opinions, then that's a mess. News is news and good journalists can present it themselves.

As for the general public, sure a lot might be stupid. But most are too busy trying to put bread on the table. The least a good media can do is to present a balanced picture and to empower workers, but the media is a con. It isn't there to do that. It is there to empower the upper classes. Whence 'opening time on Wall street at CNN' (as if any working man could give a shit?), BBC business report (as if any coal miner gives a flying fuck?), latest currency prices (for people going on holiday?). Where are the labour reports? Or the latest REAL unemployment figures? Things that really matter to real people? Simply too few and far between.

The news is largely a con and even the better organisations like the BBC fall into it. I regard everything I read with suspicion.

[Gandalf]

And it could be argued that 'Hey miles, maybe you were just a crap student'. Well, I wasn't the best considering I had habits beyond academic pursuits but I produced some good work. I later studied for my MA and decided to follow all the rules at a British university ranked high up in the worlds top 100 and got myself a distinction. If I had decided to stand out too much, I would have been penalised and scored lower. I knew this. This for me further supports my notions about higher university education.

If you follow the accepted train of thought then you will generally perform better. You've got to respect all the others in your field. You need references, you need people who will publish you. These people are typically above you when you are writing essays. It's an old fashioned power structure, much like that found in the media or even in politics.