I'm Back; I, Too, Had a Blast

[peristaltor]

Just took a road trip, flying down to Phoenix and driving the folks' car back to the North West. Grabbed lunch with geezer_also on the way and visited various friends that have relocated south.

What I did not do, though, was watch or listen to any news. None.

In fact, this started way before I left on the 18th. Right after The Wife™ informed me of the Boston Marathon explosions, I decided that our country's news media was, as John Stewart once described, like a bunch of school kids playing soccer—"Follow the ball! Follow the ball!!!"—so much so that I was unlikely to hear anything but Boston Blast Bullshit. Why give those guys the ratings to increase their coffers? Not my job.

So I find perusing LJ that more than Boston happened, but did not become news. theweaselking notes a Washington Post opinion piece that almost nails the situation:

On Friday, as cable news networks sought desperately to fill airtime while waiting for the latest news in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, a friend asked me, “How come there’s no manhunt for the owner of the Texas factory, which did far more damage than the Boston bombers?” He was right to wonder.

The explosion of the West Fertilizer Co. plant on April 17 in West, Tex., killed 14 people, injured more than 160 and destroyed dozens of buildings. Yet unlike the tragedy in Boston, the Texas plant explosion began to vanish from cable TV less than 36 hours after it occurred.

The author correctly points out that this is potentially a much bigger story. "After all, while it remains difficult to deduce the motives of the alleged Boston bombers, it is not so difficult to postulate what was behind the explosion at the West Fertilizer Co.’s plant: the failure to follow the science of workplace safety." The plant had "1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security", and for some reason "no alarms, automatic shutoff system, firewall or sprinkler system". That sounds like a story the media should hound into the ground, no?

No. Not in a commercial media environment, it doesn't.

Corporate media must pay the bills. Those bills are paid for by advertisers. Ads buy the buying companies more than exposure for products.

They buy silence.

At the end of his opinion rant, Elk shares a reporter's tweet that supposedly sums up the situation: “Terrorists want media attention, so we give it to them. Unsafe industries don’t want media attention — so we give that to them.” That is factual, I admit, but misleading. It misses the actual cause. Try this take on it:

"Terrorists want media attention, but can't afford it; they do violent things to get it instead. Unsafe industries want no media attention; not only can they afford media silence, the more unsafe they are, the more profit they generate and the more silence they can buy."

Here's a rule of thumb, folks; if the media you consume has ads in it, you are consuming corporate lies. It's unavoidable.

X-Posted to talk_politics.