Cleveland’s Village Idiot in the Pain Dealer
I tried, I have really tried to keep paying for delivery of the Pain Dealer.
I’ve almost canceled a few other times - once during the Wide Open Blog fiasco, and then the last O’Brien column when Kevin mocked Democrats after he and his fellow thugs debased the electoral process by taking Dem ballots and voting for Clinton.
But O’Brien’s latest column debasing global climate change scientists is the last straw.
It is clear that after all these years that the PD doesn’t fire O’Brien because at some deep level they have to agree with what he’s writing AND he remains the deputy editorial page director. His choices influence the Op-ed page of the PD, which is already an industry joke and a local embarrassment. It’s about as thin as the reasoning O’Brien uses.
I had hoped that Susan Goldberg might change things at the PD but it is evident that’s same old same old at the Daily Disappointment that this newspaper has become.
It is, and will remain, nothing more than a corporate rag sheet.
As for O’Brien’s latest column, suffice it to say that, in his bully boy way, being a stenographer to power, he believes that since global climate change advocates use anecdotal evidence than its OK for him to do the same. This, apparently, is how he views journalism.
For the record, most Americans, including O’Brien, are totally clueless on global climate change. Some want to remain willfully clueless because, well, they see the whole thing as some kind of ’socialist plot’ to separate them from the SUVs and outdoor gas grills.
Well fine. You know, if that’s what its going to come down to, let the Earth burn. I just hope I’m dead and my kids are dead before the worst hits - and that my sons don’t reproduce.
I got the skinny on the whole issue about 10 years ago on a Midway Airport shuttle in Chicago. I sat next to a research meteorologist for the Argonne National Laboratories. I made a comment on the snow in March having something to do with global warming and he kindly set me straight.
He said the correct term, which I have used ever since, is global climate change. To focus on the ‘warming’ was missing the point by a mile, he told me.
The point is that there was not going to be a steady climb in what we would perceive as heat in the atmosphere at ground level, he said. The Earth was simply too big and complex for that.
What would happen, he said, is that the weather would become increasingly unpredictable and more violent over time as the Earth’s mean temperature increased. Some violently snowy winters would occur and some unusually cold periods in summer would also happen, he said.
But eventually the ice sheets would melt and eventually there would be climatological feedback mechanisms kicking in. It wouldn’t happen quickly, but when the feedback mechanisms starting kicking in, things would accelerate but nothing along the lines portrayed in the movie The Day After Tomorrow.
And, in fact, he confided to me that the public misconception about the process and the political aspects of trying to ameliorate the effects of global climate change worried him and other research meteorologists greatly. Because the effects required a fairly complex scientific explanation, he feared that people would simply not listen and that politicians could exploit that ignorance to ignore the problem until it was too late.
I think he was thinking about people like Kevin O’Brien and his ilk.
I’m always reminded of the Ogden Nash ditty about people like that:
Oh you can’t say when to company men,
For it’s always when to they,
They were doing fine in ‘29
And they’re doing fine today.
You could check out another article in today’s International Herald Tribune if you need to breathe the fresh air of real science after reading the choking ignorance of Kevin O’Brien. Those who don’t get their whole news feed from the American corporate controlled media know what the score it. Were it that other Americans took advantage of the amazing resource of the Internet and learned how the world really sees us and the problems our planet faces.
The Plain Dealer can print whatever their corporate chieftains want them to print. I don’t have to pay for it.
And so it ends, a lifelong love affair with print journalism. For the first time since I was 10-years-old, I will have no newspaper delivered to where I am.
It would be patently unfair to blame the PD for the ills of the business. There’s a lot of blame to go around, of course. First and foremost, I blame corporate America for destroying journalism in this country and turning a precious 1st Amendment resource into yet another profit stream for Wall Street. And by destroying the basic nature of journalism, AND ignoring the impact of citizen journalism and the Internet, they have guaranteed themselves their coming obsolescence.
The second blame is the people in the craft themselves who, by and large, accepted cozy middle class lifestyles in exchange for becoming stenographers to power and lifestyle writers. The whole point of being a journalism was not come to work in a shirt and tie and brag about your political connections at the fern bar. It was to inform the public on the critical issues of the day and give them that ‘light’ so that they could find their own way (yeah, from the Scripps-Howard logo, once a Cleveland Press employee, always one).
But the whole craft pretty much sold out for a little comfort and J schools generally followed the emasculation that came with ‘professionalism.’ Now the best journalism, hands down, is being done by small independent newspapers and on the Internet. Newspapers have watched themselves become primarily a conduit for advertising, comics, sports and movie listings. Most big city American newspapers have become very cozy with being part of the local power structure rather than a check and balance on that power. They just don’t care and it shows.
Journalism, real journalism, was supposed to help lead society, not mirror its worst biases and prejudices. But no one is leading anymore. Instead, we get columnists like Kevin O’Brien.
And the American people are also to blame. Generally our own society enthusiatically participated in our collective dumbing down. And because of that, we refused to read newspapers if they didn’t dumb their content down for us. Television didn’t kill newspapers directly, but when Americans wanted their news in the simple language of television, newspapers, fearing losing market share, followed suit and the downward spiral started.
People didn’t clamor for anything better. And then after media consolidation in the 1990s, ownership no longer cared about those who wanted print journalism to live up to its ideals. Newspapers were now house organs for corporate America editorially. Marketing took over to serve Wall Street and newspapers began to resemble sports and lifestyle magazines more than news organs. The cry has always been ‘we had to do that to survive.’ My retort is: you’re doing that and dying anyway.
So enough. Our society gets pretty much both the media and government it deserves and it seems like we’re getting both lately good and hard as H. L. Mencken would have said.
The last best hope of what passes for journalism today is the Internet. For all its faults and wonderful lack of media gatekeepers, the truth is not to be found on the pages of your local corporate rag but right here on your screen, provided YOU take the time and effort to find it.
