Random acts of writing: What I would like to see

By Craig Carter
Saturday, October 10, 2009 11:01 PM PDT

You know what I’d like to see? Just once, I’d like to see one of the cable news outlets, or just one of the broadcast news departments, actually do their job and get one of their reporters who supposedly went to journalism school to learn how to do such things, to actually read the entirety of the pending health care legislation and then report it as fact. Not what they think it says, not what they think it might mean, but just what it says.

Frankly, I’m tired of it all. I’m tired of people trying to tell me the president wants to kill old people, babies, the infirmed and geeky, little, smart-alecky columnists who write for small town newspapers. Furthermore, I’m tired of people trying to tell me overhauling health care won’t cost the taxpayers a dime, because I know for a fact that when the House, Senate and a large chunk of the Executive Branch spend this much time hammering out legislation, someone is definitely going to take it in the shorts, and that someone usually isn’t someone from the House, the Senate or the Executive Branch.

Still, in all, I just want the facts. Not the opinion of some bubble-headed nimrod who’s paid to further a partisan agenda one way or another, trying to tell me their way of thinking is the only way to think about all this.

In other words, I want journalists to start acting like journalists. I realize it’s a mighty tall order, but I think somewhere out there in that vast 24-hour news cycle universe, there’s at least one person who reveres Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley enough to actually want to perform the task the press is supposed to perform. Which is to keep a free electorate informed.

I’m tired of narrow-visioned pundits laboring under the misguided belief that I desperately need them to analyze the news for me. As someone with an IQ above room temperature, I like to think I can get by without some fat moron in a radio booth or some equally moronic, celebrity- and scandal-obsessed cable news hound telling me what I just saw and heard.

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Of course, we have to stop to realize the only reason they get away with all this is because we, the audience, allow it. We’ve told them we like our news to be grossly interspersed with celebrity gossip and nonsense news analysis. So, at the end of the day, it’s our fault.

They don’t do what you want unless you tell them what you want. People are just funny that way.

Craig Carter, an Ontario resident, writes a bi-weekly column for the Argus Observer. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the Argus Observer.