May 20, 2010

Twisting Stories

The national media is a strange thing. The Deepwater Horizon exploded and killed people, and oil from it may or may not cause ecological problems, the amount and severity of which is not well known, and most of the predicted problems failed to arrive for weeks. Floods in Nashville, Tennessee killed people and caused incredible amounts of damage, and within hours endangered and inconvenienced many, many, people. Yet the news media continually dwells on the oil spill, and has devoted almost no time to the flood or the cleanup. This is especially perplexing given the amount of coverage given to Hurricane Katrina, another natural disaster. I suspect that the oil spill provides a more natural storyline for the mainstream media. It considers big coporations in and of itself, and oil companies to be extremely evil, so of course the oil companies are cast as the villains. They in their hubris, according to the media storyline, attempt to plunder the earth, and destruction and death ensues for pitiful wildlife. You may be surprised to learn that thus far, oil hasn't even reached beaches, given the way that the news keeps harping on the stories. They have nothing more to say, for in their mind, the story is that an evil company has done something evil. The facts of the matter, or the true tragedy of the story, involving those rig workers who died, can be ignored to keep the story straight. Let's all keep this story-twisting in mind the next time we hear the national media talk about another evil corporation - the story may be, like the foods we ought to be eating, juicy and extremely fact-free, with reduced context.