I’m heading off to Wyoming next week, and I won’t be able to publish the next edition of the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine until a week after I return. But Ed Risse has a time-sensitive column he’d like to put into the public domain before it gets too stale.
Good News, Bad Reporting
As the economy weakens, you can count on the MainStream Media to defend MassOverconsumption and Business As Usual in a desperate bid to keep the advertising dollars flowing.
In this column, EMR picks through a stack of year-end articles from the Washington Post and other MSM publications on the economy, and interprets them through the prisms of the Mobility and Access Crisis, the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis and the Helter Skelter Crisis. EMR argues that the rash of gloomy headlines confirms his thesis that the Business-As-Usual economy is not just environmentally unsustainable but fiscally and socially unsustainable.
EMR also argues that WaPo and the rest of the MainStream Media fail to see the forest for the trees, unable or unwilling to elucidate the common threads that bind these seemingly divers developments. He attributes this institutional blindness to the transformation of newspapers and other news outlets from members of the “Fourth estate” to commercially driven enterprises with a stake in maintaining Business As Usual.