Us and Them and Rice Pickers and Jerks like O’Reilly

Robert’s Orientalism and Manufacturing Consent presentation was so focused and direct that I was able to glean a lot from it. I had never given much thought to how The Daily Show put a twist on the news; I knew that they pointed out absurdities in reporting, but beyond that, I had no clue exactly.

We really do have an emphasized figure of a middle-eastern terrorist, don’t we? That “they” are the enemy brings a lot of connotations with it. And, of course, if one doesn’t know anything about the situation—or the world, for that matter—then one could be carrying around more damaging connotations.

I was talking with a guy from South Africa last week about race and Darfur and the war. He told me that South Africa looks down on places such as Darfur and Rwanda, because they are uneducated and give Africans a bad name. He said, “a lack of education will lead people to do some very stupid things. Hunger will lead people to do some very stupid things. They will kill another person for five dollars if they are uneducated and hungry.” I thought this was an interesting point. Here our country is overweight and obviously undereducated. What is keeping us from learning about the world so we don’t do ‘some very stupid things’? How do we save humanity (even if we are a virus in shoes)? Viva la Revolution! =)

I haven’t been able to look at Robert’s links, because as I’m typing this, the blog “cannot be found” on the server. I have other sites to suggest, though. Fair.org is one that stands for “fairness and accuracy in reporting.” There is another I check out sometimes, when I tire of hearing about Fox, called moveon.org. It’s just as biased, though. They have a sister organization devoted wholly to trying to elect progressives into office. They are good for things like comparing the sides of issues, though.

I wholeheartedly agree that we should get our news from a lot of sources so that we can compare and contrast what’s being said and hopefully walk away with some truth about situations. Personally, I haven’t had time to do this much the latter part of the semester. But we do what we can, right?