GOOD JOB, MAINSTREAM MEDIA!!

I was re-reading over one of my old, ranty posts about the RNC/DNC. One of the comments I made was regarding the mainstream media's failure to adequately explain the causes of the Russia's invasion of Georgia, back when that was going down. Now that the financial markets are a mess, I come back to criticize the mainstream media AGAIN for doing a piss-poor job of explaining what happened during the financial crisis, why it happened, what that means for you and me, what the bail-out is REALLY going to do, etc. I don't anyone has a good sense of it, myself included, and I don't think the entirety of that is due to people's laziness. People care about this; it's going to effect them in intense and long-lasting ways. When a country with an economy such as ours moves into a recession, the shit hits the fan. Up to this point, the information has been so scattered and useless as to render any proper understanding impossible without a significant amount of work.

Do you know what a Credit Default Swap is? Or a Collateralized Debt Obligation? No? Of course not, because no one took the time to do a good job explaining any of these high-tech financial instruments to you. Understanding how they went about creating this mess is important to understanding how we are (compared to how we should) go about cleaning up this mess. Especially regarding how we're going to now regulate the financial markets after something like this, without having any information, people fall back on their ideologies, with the "free-marketists" prefering less regulation, tending to blame government incentives for causing problems, vs. "government-interventionists" who believe the government should do more to regulate a problem such as this. However, ultimately, unless you're expert or work heavily in the financial sector, you're not really going to have enough information to come up with any ideas more specific than your ideology would lead you to believe.

I'm of the opinion that, at a minimum, everyone should be watching the news on a daily basis. The only problem with that is you really won't know a whole lot more than you would if you didn't, except you'd get an overview of the days events, divorced from any background or any sense of understanding what's actually happening and WHY. The only way for that idea to work is for the mainstream media to do its due dilligence, get the information we need, and give it to us in a form we can understand and use. If the mainstream media fails to properly explain such a momumental event, it's about time we demanded some change from them as well.

Part of the problem is that because of the way information has been given to us in the past, we've gotten to used to getting this "half-information" and believe we actually have an understanding of the issues because of it. However, every time I've gotten what I thought was an understanding of an event or issue from the mainstream media, further investigation always proved me wrong. If we believe we're getting enough information from the media, there is no impetus to change it.

It's a matter of recognizing the obvious limitations of the mainstream media and demanding better from them, as servers of the public good.