Podcast 546

Podcast 546-What Is Next? Almost all media these days is advocacy journalism. It used to be called ‘yellow journalism’. Back in the day yellow journalism was characterized by newspaper publishers like William Randolph Hearst who, when an artist he’d sent to Cuba cabled Hearst the fact that the USS Maine had blown up because of an accident, famously replied, “You supply the pictures, I’ll supply the war!” Everywhere we turn these days we are bombarded with the surface arguments. The personalities, the propaganda, the arguing back and forth. It goes far beyond media bias. It has become media advocacy. Telling you and I who to vote for and why. Telling us what we are to believe in and what our country stands for, and why. It’s a fact of life on both sides of the fence. We end up going back and forth about nonsense, most of the time. For me to add to this noise, seems to be a waste of time. Of course I have my own point of view about politics these days, and I’ll try and save most of those observations for podcasts detailing state by state polls, or addressing specific issues when they need to be addressed. How you vote, who you vote for and why you vote the way you do is your business. The easy thing to do these days is turn on the microphone and bloviate about what happened on the campaign trail today. It is much harder to find something to discuss that goes beyond. Hence Podcast 546-What Is Next? How can we move to the next step in the country and the world. Not what happens after election day 2016, or Inauguration Day 2017. This question deals with what happens down the line. If we spent a fraction of our time actually trying to inform ourselves about issues we can know about, rather than consuming propaganda, we would be better citizens and better stewards of the future for the country. The answers to the things we can know about, aren’t in social media or even necessarily searchable. The answers are in libraries. We can’t be fully informed about an issue if we don’t even know what questions to search. So let’s get started answering the question, What’s Next? Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul and Hydrus Performance.

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Podcast 429

Politics as Sport. Millions of people watched the most recent Republican debate on CNBC this week, and everyone is talking about how the candidates ‘really gave it to the moderators’. The moderators had it coming, but was this a surprise? Do you mean say the media is biased? Really? How shocking if true, right? Meanwhile this week a US Destroyer sailed past man-made islands claimed by China provoking quite a response. While the US should challenge Chinese ‘ownership’ of these islands this is just the kind of incident that creates foreign policy crises seemingly ‘out of nowhere’. To add insult to injury House Republicans this week voted to increase federal spending by 50 billion dollars in 2016 and something like 30 billion in 2017. (Editor’s Note: Republicans were shocked and dismayed in the 1970’s when President Carter’s budget deficit hit 45 billion.) Talk about the GOP betrayal of their voters? No, let’s talk about media bias, again. Republican and Democrat candidates running for their party’s nomination to run for president – technically not running for president yet – continue to play to the biases and fears of their most vociferous supporters, as part of a sick and dangerous symbiosis between media, pollsters, and politicians. People watch to see who will be ‘thrown off the island last’. Indeed, politics is being covered not as sports as covered, but is in fact a sport in itself. Why not talk about video games and fantasy football at the debates? The election is already a fantasy football league or video game, or reality TV show, anyway. With most people getting their news in shards from social media, google searches, You Tube and other sources like this, the story about three deep space objects hiding behind the moon is perceived with the same credibility as the story of US Special Forces and Navy Helicopters being deployed to Syria, where they may be as likely to get into combat with Russians and Chinese troops as they are to fight ISIS. We’re ‘Cruisin For A Bruisin’ in the United States if this is how we expect to elect the next President, and subsequently run the country. Don’t forget to join The Bob Davis Podcasts and Jason Lewis for a live podcast Saturday, Halloween at 11:00 AM in Lakeville, Minnesota at the Main Street Cafe. Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul. (Editor’s Note: I refer to Russia Today, which is a propaganda outlet for the Russian Government as Russia Times. It’s RT or Russia Today.) 

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