Journalists are highly educated? Well, well. You learn something new every day, eh? >};o)

The root of the issue with the media is that we’ve given it way too much power in our society, and because of that, it’s attracted entirely the wrong sort of people. We’re in that shadow zone, right now, in between where those people still have some of their unearned credibility, and the next era when they have none.

It’s not healthy, at all, on a social scale.

How about a magazine where every writer must pass an IQ test?

Doesn’t speak to the wit and wisdom of the average person. Not at all. Got into an argument with one of the mal-educated elite, the other day, and shut him right the hell up when he tried telling me, in essence, that if it were printed or broadcast in the news, it had to be true, true, true.

My question? “Hmmm. So… In your personal experience, who was it that went for their degrees in journalism, and communication… All that crap: Were they the best and brightest? The smartest kids in the room? Or, were they people who fell into those majors because they couldn’t hack anything more difficult? What requirements are there for journalism? Do they have to do, y’know… Math? Statistics? Logic? Any of that stuff…?”.

End of the conversation, he pretty much shut up. His first wife was a “journalist”, and she damn near ruined his life.

Good lord. Are you suggesting graduation from Columbia J School is not the equivalent of a master’s in Engineering from MIT?

Line-level people are morons, but that doesn’t discount the existence of underlying interests in the establishment of supra”national” taxes, which are the founding and existential purpose of all government. Nuclear power in particular was shanked by the will of an interesting group.

One of the bigger problems we have is that the “nervous system” of the nation is filled with morons who no more understand what they’re writing about than a trained monkey. They’re not “deep thinkers”, they’re mostly pretty people with egos the size of a warehouse, and nothing at all in between their ears.

If you look at the twaddle put out by the media, and which is never questioned, it’s no damn wonder we keep making bad decisions. How many times has the story changed on things like diet, and whether or not coffee is bad for you? And, every single time the “conventional wisdom” shifts, there’s the news media, pious and straight-faced, reporting the exact opposite of last week’s wisdom, all the while ignoring the fact that it’s in diametric opposition.

The real idiots aren’t in the media, though–It’s us. How many of us really pay attention, and bother to remember what was said by the same jackasses a few years ago?

If you put any belief in anything these people tell you, in whatever medium they fill with BS, it’s not their fault. It’s yours. You’re too stupid and forgetful to see that they’re unreliable liars.

I would love to have kept a list of all the things that “changed” in the media, down the years I’ve been paying attention. I used to spend my lunch hours in the school libraries reading the newspapers and news magazines, seeking to understand the world around me. I used to take all that crap at face value, but then I started to notice all the inconsistencies and “shifts”. Pay attention to the way they say one thing, now, and then when the enemy of the moment changes what they’re doing, all of a sudden that’s the bad thing. Trump is a wonderful illustration of all that, and you can see the mind-bending hypocrisy oozing out, practically in real time. If Trump tweeted tomorrow that kids ought to be eating their vegetables, then the day after, that’d be a sign he was in bed with “Big Vegetable”, and that he was seeking to cause cancer in schoolchildren by exposing them to carcinogens in the food chain…

Only news here? Someone’s noticing it all, and highlighting it.

At any rate, it is surprisingly difficult to get entertainment media to present radiation as a physical attack rather than a chem or bio agent. There is something about contamination/contagion that cries out for those kinds of stories and visual metaphors we associate with disease, or chemical spills at best. I’m not sure how they could deal with it more accurately and tell their dramatic stories, I mean these kinds of exposures would still be horrifying. Somehow, it never gets presented properly.

Just think. Those organs, and many like them, and their target audiences, are the people forever lecturing us about their strict adherence to evidence-based answers, reason, logic, Science!, materialism, whenever anyone transgresses any of their preferred pseudoscience or spiritual bugaboos. I’ll bet even People, from whom no comments should be expected at all, has managed to do so at least once.

Physicians, heal thyselves.

Of course, there is a fair amount of crossover between anti-nuclear and anti-vaxx, so it’s not like there’s no cutting across ideological lines.