Cable News Jumps the Sharknado

Since the disappearance of Flight 370, American cable news has variously attributed the event to a zombie epidemic, supernatural teleportation or, more scientifically (if no more rationally), a black hole.

The fact that a black hole on Earth would have destroyed not merely the passenger jet, but also the entire planet and the solar system would, however, seem to me to be the bigger headline.

The Society for Professional Journalists’ first ethical principle is “Seek the truth and report It,” not “Just pull some speculative bullshit out of your ass and fling it.”

Funny, yes, but frightening, too. Why? Because without professional journalism — of verified, reliable, relevant fact — a society will not, finally, stand, any more than bridges will stand without honest professional engineers.

For some time now, CNN’s corporate managers have been on a quest to “dumbify” their already-enfeebled news operation so that they can cravenly compete for ratings with cable’s all-propaganda channel, Fox News.

Meanwhile, Fox News was suggesting that CNN’s over-the-top coverage of the missing plane was merely an attempt to distract the public from the dead horse, GOP-scripted issue that Fox has been flogging — Benghazi.

The U.S. corporate media has reached a state that may safely be termed dreadful. Corporate America has never actually cared for journalism at all. The profession, with its emphasis on factual truth, always tends to threaten someone’s bottom line, and to Hindenburg those expensively inflated propaganda balloons that are used to sell wars, derivatives and other such cons.

Corporate America would much prefer to replace actual journalism with a see-no-evil, happy-talk witch’s brew of PR and advertising, and merely call that "journalism."

In both teaching and journalism, we are facing a culture that, for certain quiet, nefarious reasons, is deliberately working to guarantee that the jobs cannot be done — and then feigning shock when the jobs are not, in fact, done.

Ignorance really has plenty of adherents, you know. They just don't like to advertise that fact.