Day: March 22, 2016

I remain convinced that there is simply no need for a 24 hr news cycle, and further convinced that such a cycle creates such a swell of fear (especially in the American populace) that it is detrimental to our collective culture. I’m out on the news media. They have become more concerned with making sure that people are watching than they have with finding something legitimate and helpful to say. In my opinion, it is only going to get worse.

The easiest way to tell the media is out to get your viewership is to look at their promos. What fallacies are being employed? It is usually fear. ‘What is in your water and are you in danger from it? Find out at 11.’ Lets be real for a minute. If you were in immediate danger from your water, they would cut into whatever you were watching and tell you. They wouldn’t make you wait until 11 and then bury the piece halfway through the broadcast, so you’ve watched long enough for Nielson’s spies to count you as ‘in’. None of that has the smell of a news media operating in your best interests. Instead the media opts to tell the stories that will get people watching. They scare us and paint the world as constantly being on the brink of war or famine or drought. Once in a while–usually on holidays–they’ll drop a ray of sunlight into the segment, just to switch things up.

The media is open about this. Les Moonves, the defacto head of CBS praised Trump’s media coverage as being ‘Damn good for business’. Les did not say he was good for the country. He said the opposite in fact.

The point is, the media is not on our side. A policy of fear and shock and showmanship has turned real news into a circus and we are left to watch the performers and never really know what is really going on.

I cannot believe I am in countdown mode but there are only 8 weeks left in my semester. I get some time off then and follow that up with an opportunity to teach classes online–classes that can readily be taught from the beach. I gotta get better internet first, of course. That’s another post. This one is about the relief I have knowing that this semester nears its conclusion. I gotta be honest, this one is breaking me in new ways. I, once a champion of dev ed, have become wildly cynical and more than a little angry in regards to the rampant disrespect foisted on me by the dev students in particular and the majority of classes in general.

Yep, rant warning.

The problem is that I continue to care quite a bit more than everyone else in the room. This is not how it should be but is clearly how it is most of the time. The one exception would be the novel classes where the students want to be there as much as I do and there is (or appears to be) a mutual respect there. In the case of dev that respect for me, for each other, for the learning doesn’t exist. I spend more time reminding them not to talk when others are talking than I do delivering content. Its a problem. It is one that forced me to build in a military-esque structure to that class, one in which there are structured writing prompts and response points throughout each period that drive students through a single essay. Yeah there is some good to that but there is as much bad, especially when you think about creativity. That is lost in the lock step of the thing.