2001 Soap Box Archives

Media Mess

We have come from a nation which read newspapers and watched Walter Cronkite a half hour a day to being inundated with news, twenty-four hours a day on several different television channels, radio and internet. I’m not saying that this is all bad. It’s good for people who work different hours to be able to learn what’s going on at their convenience. But I think it’s gotten out of hand and that the news programs wield power that they do not always use responsibly. For instance, everybody knows that the economy has slackened up a little but by the time you get through listening to Dan Rather, you’d think that we’re in the middle of a depression. People who aren’t affected at all by a lay off in technology or automotive scurry to take their money out of the stock market because ol’ Dan says that the economy is looking darker every day. So guess what? The stock market does go down after they scare people to death about losing their hard earned money. And the sports writers. I’ve never seen such a bunch of cynical, know it all, Monday morning quarterbacks in my life. They antagonize players and coaches and often give false impressions of what’s going on by magnifying some locker room incident or minor argument between the coaches and the players. One sports writer in Denver a few years ago wrote that he hoped the Broncos wouldn’t go back to the Super Bowl because everytime they went they lost and it was embarrassing. No, I’ll tell you what’s embarrassing, having a sports writer in town who’s uninformed enough to know that going to the Super Bowl is either the first or second best thing that could ever happen to a football team. And that can’t be embarrassing. And what about the weather with all the new satellite equipment they have now? Now don’t get me wrong, people should keep an eye on the weather and know if there is potentially dangerous stuff on the way. But is seems to me that if we get a heavy dew in Nashville they turn on the storm tracker and make it sound like we’re fixing to get blown and washed away. And how about the cable channels. I have caught CNN in outright lies before. I remember during the Gulf War they reported that Israel had attacked Iraq. It was totally bogus and I never once heard a retraction. And the gossip columnists should check their facts before rushing to press and therefore judgment. A local guy reported one time that I was considering retirement and anybody who knows me knows that I don’t even have that word in my reality vocabulary. One of my employees even got upset when she read it thinking that she may have to find another job. Now I know some of my detractors are going to say that I have an agenda too and they’d be absolutely right. I do have an agenda but I am stating opinion and not reporting the news. But come to think of it, I think that’s what some of the media is doing too.

What do you think?

God Bless America
Charlie Daniels