I confess I do not know what to think about any of this latest exercise in public humiliation for some otherwise fairly good guys. You can balance that with the opinion of more than one female veteran of the gender wars that they are just pigs.
The count of “possibly inappropriate” messages is eye-popping. For context, though, I see that my “read” queue (past tense) on AOL stands at almost 78,000 emails. Now, that naturally includes all the crap and advertising that flows through the system, and I confess I quit trying to clean it all up- that last occurred a couple years ago, and with the dramatic increase in electromagnetic storage, has become a non-issue.
Of course, the contents of my “sent” file might be a more accurate indicator of whether I was forwarding dumb pictures or interacting with actual humans- since 2010 (the earliest “sent” that remains on the server) is a little over 13,000. That is still a lot of dumb pictures exchanged- and as you note, the 30,000 emails between the two figures in this puzzle seems a bit…well, excessive.
But passion knows no bounds, right? Women and men. It should be no mystery, since we are all one or the other of the two, but it certainly is a strange story. It could also- though this is by no means clear- link back to the unpleasant events in Benghazi, the depths of which have yet to be plumbed, a child custody case in Tampa, an FBI Special Agent with questionable cyber etiquette, and pass through Kabul and the long war in Afghanistan.
It is a circus, and the only way to characterize the mass of factoids that constitute the news business, though. I have several friends who are routinely outraged by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, whose saucy motto “Fair and Balanced” reporting makes them froth. The same could be said of my reaction to my old friends the New York Times, who have apparently unlocked the door in the firewall between “hard news” and OpEd.
I don’t think this is what a watch-dog press is supposed to do, and I don’t particularly mind the fact that the media I listen to seems to have a tiny bit of bias- but we can’t ignore them, can we? They select, massage and present the news we need. Or something.
Listening to NPR (and the contract BBC content that fills the evening void in NPR programming) to be a sort of open-source exercise in what the accepted Narrative of the moment might be. Perhaps this is just a feckless exercise in something that the legendary Satchel Paige called “angrifying the blood,” and I may have to walk away from it all.
Things that spark my passion this morning are a little further afield than the age-old interaction of the plurality of the various sexes that make up our species. The one that is not spread all over the Mainstream Media includes the outing of the “BBC 28,” or what wags in the climate wars are calling “28-Gate.” It is a fascinating list of individuals who have established the editorial policy of the storied network, which could be characterized (until recently, anyway) as the news outlet of record for the Globe.
The thing went down like this. Back in 2006 a meeting was held at Bush House to decided editorial policy. The result was the decision to block climate skeptics from appearing on the national taxpayer-subsidized network. The panel was composed of the “best scientific experts” available, and was conducted as a “high-level seminar…(which) has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].”
Skeptics filed the British equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to find out who exactly the best scientific experts were. The Network declined to provide the names, and found a sympathetic judge to agree. The problem arose when an adept internet user harness technology through a thing called the “Wayback Machine,” and got the list of names that had been subsequently deleted.
That is technology Generals Petraeus and Allen probably should have known about, too, but they were too busy to know that privacy is a passé concept in the wired world.
As it turned out, the 28 “experts,” included exactly two who were actually associated with climate science. The other 26 members included BBC’s head of Comedy, two senior Greenpeace activists, charity fundraisers and lobbyists for environmental groups. The policy recommendations of the panel were implemented: the publicly-funded BBC has since effectively blocked airtime to climate skeptics and eliminated the requirement for anything resembling a “fair and balanced” approach to the issue.
Oh, a disclaimer, of course. I believe in climate change. That is a redundant phrase. That is what it does. To the best of my knowledge, the consensus is clear: global temperatures on the way out of the last ice age have indeed risen between a half and three quarters of a degree Celcious since 1840, but have stabilized or declined for the last sixteen years. It changes.
Further truth in advertising: I was once compensated for commentary that aired on the famed network, and thus I should have known that there was something fishy.
The old Russian aphorism seems appropriate, given the multiple revelations we are dealing with this week: “There is no news in Izvestia, and no truth in Pravda.”
Not that we didn’t know it, but the election dammed up a lot of strange facts and they had to be processed by the media machine so they could be ignored.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com