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Corrupt Stupidity: The Plague of Mainstream Media’s Attention Deficit Disorder

Old Friend on the Phone last Friday: “I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take these lying fucks. I’ve been reading four newspapers a day for decades and it has gotten to such a level of lying I can’t take it. And the fucking tube is just a cathedral of worms and lies. I can’t watch them for a second anymore. It’s like watching worms move in their mouths. I gotta give it up. I try to be unbiased or at least look at all sides but all sides now are all lies. It’s a waste of life. I can’t do it. Why are all these “news sources” the way that they are? Why?

Me (talking him down from the ledge on the cliff above his slough of respond): They can’t help themselves at this point. They are sick with a sickness bred in the bone.

Which is when I found this on an old archive shelf and brought it back into the light…

“If you tell someone they have a short attention span often enough, they might believe you enough to get one, but then they’ll forget what channel you’re on.” — TV producer, Fox News, 2002

[Editor’s Note: This is a test. A long test. If you can’t read all of this you may be infected by media-induced ADD / HD. Seek professional help.]

The Short Attention Spans of Media Professionals Mean a Hyperactive Headline Glut for You

RECENTLY I BECAME ACQUAINTED with a young boy, just turned nine. He’s a brilliant and happy kid, but he has a problem with cleaning up and organizing his room. It isn’t that he can’t do it, he simply has to be told about every five minutes to continue the process. In the course of picking things up to put away, he discovers anew their potential to fascinate him.

The Gameboy? “Oh, here’s where I saved that last stage of Turok. Let’s see if I can get the flame thrower and…”

Any one of the 3,000 + Lego units? “Gee, I never did get the moon base Hemi-dome set up, just let me put these 400 blocks in place and…” Books? “Sure thing and, hey, did Horton ever hatch that egg…”

On it goes until, after the sixth or seventh cajoling instruction, a path has been cleared for the vacuum cleaner. After which, he promptly begins taking everything he has put away out and strews it about the floor once again.

Today’s pop psychologists, addlepated educators, and the marketing departments of large drug companies are hard at work trying to convince me children who behave like this have “Attention Deficit Disorder” or ADD. But I know enough to know it is the companies who are obsessed, confused and greedy in about that order.


What this young boy suffers from is no more than being a normal, heedless, and all-around great nine-year-old boy. He doesn’t have ADD anymore than I have an elephant chained in my backyard. (Yes, I just checked.) What he does have is a smart child’s ability to multi-task beyond a normal adult’s capacity.

As adults, we are often guilty of projecting our frailties onto the young. We forget that they are more nimble in all things than we are, and are all too eager in this age of instant advice on any problem to ascribe to the young a malady confined to the mature. In this case, it is our media who suffer from this self-induced malady.

No section of our society exemplifies ADD more than Big Media whose efforts in spreading fear, uncertainty, doubt, and confusion go forward daily with no signs of stopping and less than zero signs of shame.

Big Media is happy to spread the myth of ADD / HD (Attention Deficit Disorder / Hyperactivity Disorder) affliction. In doing so they point only at the young. They are happy to do it because, in a very real way, it protects them from being seen as the single profession in which ADD / HD is a virus that threatens the lives and happiness of millions.

For centuries it has been unfashionable in the West to kill the messenger. This convention, along with so many others in the post-9/11 world, may have to be reconsidered; especially if the messenger’s message is brain death by mind-numbing media mulch.

The recent collective media hallucinations, aka “RoosianCollusionObstruction”,” underscore the fact that ADD/HD has infested Big Media.

It is not true that all the people working in the media are biased towards wanting the United States to fail all the time and everywhere. No, the terrible truth is that nearly 100 percent of media professionals are infected to the marrow of their bones with ADD / HD. And not just the “stars” but the whole pack of them, root and branch, right down to Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter, fresh from the laughable “Journalism Schools”.

The Disease and the Afflicted

Before getting down to cases, let’s look at the symptoms (with examples) of ADD/HD.

AD/HD predominately inattentive type: (AD/HD-I)

Fails to give close attention to details: Reuters
Has difficulty sustaining attention: National Public Radio.
Does not appear to listen: Ann Coulter
Struggles to follow through on instructions: Colbert
Has difficulty with organization: Dan Rather
Avoids or dislikes tasks requiring sustained mental effort: Morning Joe
Loses things: The BBC
Is easily distracted: Foreign Press Corp in War Zone once checked into comfy hotels.
Is forgetful in daily activities: Fact-checkers across the media spectrum

AD/HD predominately hyperactive-impulsive type: (AD/HD-HI)

Fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in chair: Chris Matthews
Has difficulty remaining seated: Geraldo
Runs about or climbs excessively: Acosta
Difficulty engaging in activities quietly: Fox News
Acts as if driven by a motor: The New York Times
Talks excessively: Maddow
Blurts out answers before questions have been completed: CNN
Difficulty waiting or taking turns: CNN
Interrupts or intrudes upon others: CNN in a trifecta.

AD/HD combined type: (AD/HD-C)

Individual meets both sets of inattention and hyperactive/impulsive criteria:
ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, FOX, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, LAT, WAPO, TIME NEWSWEEK, etc. and so forth ad nauseum.

As Above, So Below

These examples are only well-known metastasizing tumors of the American Media Entity (AME). What is true for the stars above is also true for all those members of AME that labor in the mud below. They have all been infected with ADD/HD and few are seeking to get well.  Ambition in the media is so vicious because the stakes are so vacuous.

MEDIA = Jobs for the Hard-Core Unemployable

Media types are, by heredity and training, unemployable in any other industry you can think of except, perhaps, sanitation, politics, and student aide in an ethnic studies department. It takes a special kind of team to design a program that requires the blathering head to say: “In AFGHANISTAN today, yet another innocent, much-loved Afghan CHILD was shot in the head by an evil member of the TALIBAN! Is this another step into the deepening quagmire of WHITE SUPREMACY? We’ll interview the CHILD’S  weeping grandmother in just a few minutes. But right now, “Is fast food fat food IF IT IS SERVED BY DONALD J. TRUMP!?”

One look at how the screens of the various news stations appear is enough to tell you everybody at the company has severe ADD / HD:

1) Main image in the center,
2) logo floating about somewhere,
3) caption identifying current blathering expert and current 30 second issue;
4) weather and / or time on the left;
5) promo for some upcoming BlatherThon on the right; and beneath it all
6) the ubiquitous crawl slips by giving you a bit of this story and a chunk of that story, neither of which has the ghost of a chance of ever being explicated in any detail on the main screen.
And just in case that is not enough to turn your neurons into weepling jelly, let’s have three “experts” on, split the screen into thirds, and have them all talk over each other at once.

Gaze upon this dog’s dinner while there’s a slow civil war on and you will have a terminal case of ADD / HD before Nancy Pelosi’s head explodes (soon).

ADD/HD: Dead Tree Editions

Front pages of newspapers are little improvement over cable news. They’ve been infected by the graphics uber alles syndrome too. “Above the fold” or “below the fold” or “across the fold.” All these have some arcane meaning to the newsdroids that yammer among themselves. Toss in little graphs of small factoids of this or that.

Magazines are worse with the triumph of two magazine support departments that should never be given any power over a magazine: art directors and circulation departments.

It is well-known among magazine editors that most magazine art directors have not been able to read anything other than the figures on their expense checks for decades. Instead, magazine art directors, who have a lot of time on their hands between frantic periods of pretending to work, have fallen in love with video games and transferred those elements wholesale to magazine layout and cover design.

The result inside and out are pages devoted to the unrestrained display of “Pix & Fonts Monthly.” Within these garish displays, the actual content of the article may be discovered by the dedicated reader, but he will have to take time for lunch while puzzling it out.

Now add to this second dog’s dinner layout style the rise of the circulation directors who, sometime at the beginning of the 1990s were told of a study that said people like to see a lot of numbers on magazine covers.

This stupid claim was enough to enable circulation directors to palm off slumping magazine sales on the fact that there “weren’t enough numbers on the cover.” Hence, you now see, especially among women’s magazines, the worst offenders, covers that contain no less than three and possibly seven sets of numbers on the cover. The theory is that if there are a lot more numbers than words, the potential reader’s ADD will be overpowered by the HD of the cover, and they will buy the magazine safe in the assumption that they will not be required to read anything inside.

Dialing for Dolor

Talk radio on the AM dial is a classic case study in media professionals with severe ADD/HD seeking to reach out and infect the entire country. A few mind-bending minutes of listening to Michael Savage will establish this point with the force of a power drill being run into your ear at high speed. Then, of course, you need to stick around for the 15 commercials in three minutes that support this drivel.

“And hey, what about that website?”

The Web is, of course, the Metropolitan Opera of Short Attention Span Theatre.

Yes, on the Web factoids, links, brief opinions, quick takes, and hyperlinks that open in new windows while pop-ups bloom above, below, to the right, to the left are what we crave. Manic clicking is what we do and few of us are above it.

Few work in the long form while many just point to the next click. And of course, for those who just can’t take it any longer, there is always “Cntrl-Q.”

Yes, it can seem like the Web, the Net, the Infospace of a Billion Lies is the ultimate source of the epidemic of ADD / HD. You could think that. I have thought that. But, as usual, I could be wrong. You too. Unless you are stuck on the home page of MSNBC, CNN, or FOXNEWS which manages to roll everything above into a dense wad of crap.

Then they make it all blink.

Lucidity from Above?

Seen from the surface, the Web is a vast uncountable, unsearchable and unknowable infinity of links and texts in which we see, for the first time, everything that we, as human beings, are.

We see the best of ourselves and the worst of ourselves.

We see the greatest works of art and the most degraded images of hate, lust, and atrocity.

The Web is the first medium in which any number can play, which has almost no economic barriers to entry, and as a result becomes, in time, the perfect mirror of our souls at this time and in this place.

The Web can be, and most often is, the most trivial of our mediums. But it is also, at some times and in some way, the corrective to all the other mediums.

And while the Web exemplifies the symptoms and effects of ADD / HD better than any other medium, it also holds within it, like the mold on bread or the pox on the cow, the cure for what ails us. As was said once a couple of years ago, the Web can “fact check your ass.”

Media Mogul, Anchor, or Pundit: they used to be such cushy jobs, such posh titles. Jobs for life. And for a fading few they remain so, but all can see that the age of the anchor, the expert expert, and the preening pundit are drawing to a close.

That Big Media still believes there is money to be made by shoveling its ADD / HD into the collective consciousness of America is manifest in the continuing race of television, radio, and magazines towards the bottom of the social cesspool. But when they get there will they find the intelligent and affluent waiting to buy their sponsors’ products?

Or will they find themselves increasingly dependent on the mouthbreathers of Vanity Fair and applauders of Dr. Phil to chip in and do the Dew and buy the pickups that will keep their cash flow positive? That they’ve chosen to go for the latter is evident by the programming choices and editorial decisions that are clearer and clearer with every passing day. But sooner or later, like all those infected with addictions, they will bottom.

And then they will know that they finally have to get clean. One of the great virtues of the Web is that it is hastening that day.

Except for backward glances that sneer at Big Media’s infection with ADD / HD they’ve determined to look at the prime sources, to do their own thinking, to consult a number of background documents. They’ve left the youth market, with its towering debt and low cash flow, to those who want to sell soda pop and infosquibs. They’ve become, in a very real sense, awakened from the decades of increasing ADD / HD that make up the Big Media mosaic. They’ve taken the admonition of Scoop Nisker (” If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” ) to heart. They are basing what they think and what they buy and how they feel on deeper sources than Big Media is capable of supplying.

Like the truth, they are out there.

[First Written long, long ago in March 11, 2005]

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Rob De Witt May 23, 2019, 11:07 AM

    TL;DR

    And btw, “predominantly.”

  • ghostsniper May 23, 2019, 11:50 AM

    I walked into my friend Steve’s guitar store and said, “Wut up dawg?”, and saw that he was sitting at his desk hovering over his notebook with his head in his hands. He stood up and with a voice full of angst and despair said, “There’s too much information out there!” I said, “Man, are we going to have this conversation again?”

    If you haven’t been around for a long while you might not be aware of it. But those of us that have, are and we don’t like it. The days when it was possible to actually get something constructive done on the web. And with only one browser, and tabs hadn’t even been thought of yet. Netscape Navigator for example. Or the other guy. shrug. When Google was brand new, all the rage, and got stuff done right now. And when there were only 10,000,000 websites and all of them were trying their best to be new and unique, every dam day. sigh

    No matter what you look up now you most likely won’t find it in the first go round. Or 10. Most likely you’ll max out pretty quick in the futility and go find something to do in meatspace that satisfies. Then after a few hours of depressurization you’ll try again, if you hadn’t forgot about it.

    Now that the the cold weather is gone I’m spending less time in browserville and broadening my visual scope and manual dexterity. Screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers, recip saws, and shit. Those things fill a void that pixels cannot. Just holding them in my hands, or moving them around on the workbench works for me. And scanning the perimeter of the workshop looking for something to do.

    Look! Over there against the wall. What is that? I move some boxes and lo and behold, it’s a stack pipes and stuff my son laid there about 8 years ago on one of his “hit and run” excursions back and forth from Florida. 8 separate keyboard stands disassembled. What a mess. Finger pinchers for sure. I grabbed a piece of pipe and shook it lightly and it dislodged itself. I laid it on the workbench and went back to the pile. Grabbed another. Then another. Soon I had all the parts laid out on the 2 workbenches and wondered what to do with them. I have 2 digital keyboard rigs (Roland and Yamaha) and they both already have stands. Should I load these things up in the truck and head for the dump? Hell no! If I do that the very next day something will come up to where I could have used them. It always works that way. I have stuff for decades, always moving it out of the way, then when I get rid of it the perfect use for it shows up. sigh I get the big idea that I could use a keyboard stand as a make-shift outfeed table for the tablesaw the next time I need to rip a full sheet of 11/16th plywood.

    So I clean all the pipes and fittings with Simple Green and clean shop rags and I categorize them according to diameter and length, then the end parts that connect everything together. Then I zip tie the groups and find an old amazon box to put them it. I load them in the box and then find out it’s not big enough, the lid won’t shut. Damn. Hate it when that happens. The lid has to shut so that I can put another box on top when the time comes. And to keep sawdust out. That shit goes everywhere. So I get a bigger box and do it all over again. Then I grab my BIG Sharpie and write “Keyboard Stands” on all 6 sides and squeeze it into a rare empty space on one of the floor to ceiling shelves. That took about an hour or so so and with a small sense of accomplishment I come into my office and chase Shannon off my chair and sit down and see whats up at AD. Now, back out to the workshop to see what my next mini-adventure will be….

    • gwbnyc November 22, 2021, 10:58 AM

      man this was kinda long.

      • ghostsniper November 22, 2021, 1:19 PM

        Longer than the amount of time you spent online today?

        It’s cold, but I’m in the workshop sanding a large 19th century wood china hutch I purchased for my wife. The previous owner thought it would be cool to have that pseudo-hipster look, where it was painted one color, then painted another color, then sanded down to reveal the under color. Ugh. Cheap people and their cheap thoughts. So yeah, I’m exposing raw wood, little by little. By machine and by hand. The window is open and the box fan is blowing outward sucking the micro-dust outside. This is going to take a long time.

        Step 2: I take breaks from the hutch and come into my office where I am reversing a houseplan that I drew backwards last week. It happens. In Cape Coral, where this house will be built, there are electric poles every 2 houses on each street. So 1 power pole services 4 houses. 1 on either side, and the 2 directly across the road. It’s customary for the electric input (meter and panel) to be installed at the garage. So the house I drew last week was ass backwards from how the power pole is located. If I “mirror” the plan all of the text on the plan will be in reverse, so I tediously have to go through it and remirror all of it. 1 piece at a time. It’s like factory work. So I take breaks and go sand. Until I get bored with that too.

        A part of me would like to just get rid of the computers I use everyday. They are becoming slave drivers and anyone that knows me I violently resist authority. They slowly crept into my life almost 40 years ago and little by little took over more and more of my life. In the beginning I was thrilled with learning more and more things that computers would do for me, never grasping what they prevented me from doing. Now, it was never more clear. There IS life outside of Computerville but it needs to be rediscovered. The hard part is that so much of ALL day to day activities are attached to the computer. I’m going to apply a finish to the china hutch at some point but I need to educate myself on the options. The easiest way to research this is on the web. See what I mean? I can’t seem to let go completely. So I’ll sit down and type in “best finish for restored wood furniture” and 1.3 million websites show up. Of that 1.3 mil only about .0001 % will actually have anything to do with what I need but there is no way to know which ones they are except through trial and error. By the time I chase down the 10th wrong lead I am maxxed out and decide to check in at AD and the next thing I know is that another hour has been chopped off the end of my life and I still don’t know what finish to get for the china hutch. So I go back out in the workshop and sand some more….and think…. Sure is cold out here.

      • Denny July 27, 2022, 1:50 PM

        “Brevity is the soul of wit”
        Polonius, act 2 scene 2, Hamlet

    • foo July 27, 2022, 5:55 PM

      “go to the dump?”
      yes.

  • Sam L. May 23, 2019, 11:53 AM

    One HELL of a post, Gerard!

  • Marica May 23, 2019, 12:25 PM

    Made it. It wasn’t *that* long– six pages, not even 3000 words.

  • Harry May 23, 2019, 12:53 PM

    Adding to the news media’s encouragement of ADD/ADHD is the fact that (or at least it seems to me) at least half of most print news stories are Twitter reactions to the story. Not only do we get the quote from the tweet but then the tweet is embedded. Laziness or is something more sinister afoot?

  • Chris May 23, 2019, 2:26 PM

    I unplugged and sold the TV about a decade ago, as well as turned off the radio and mags/newspapers. I read this blog, WRSA, and a few others. At 52 I realize almost everything I was “taught” from my youth was misleading at best and pure horseshit at its worst.
    And the decline continues….
    CIII

  • jwm May 23, 2019, 3:22 PM

    I have no TV, radio, or newspaper. I get what I need to know from the desktop, and I find now that even desktop users are dinosaurs. Unplugging changes your perspective. I see television only when I go into restaurants. What I see is toxic, frenetic, and insufferably didactic for the One True Faith of Wokeness.
    I tire of classic rock, but the new sound is jinglepop. It sounds like an ad from Korean children’s TV.
    Too, I’m a cranky old fart.

    But I’ve seen a few things recently that surprised me, and gave me some hope.
    One was a post on the local “Next Door” site. We are undergoing an invasion of homeless around here. The citizens are pissed. Two people got all holier than thou about it, and even called us Hitler for not welcoming the urban campers. They both got flamed off the board until the mods shut down the thread. But a new homeless thread is up and running. People are taking action.
    The next two were on Facebarf. One was a thread about tranny athletes; It was not the Prager U thread. No wokeness there At. All. Dozens of people were not shy about their disgust with the whole tranny thang.
    Finally, there was today, also on Face barf. Pelousi was getting dumped on ferociously. Anti- Trumpers were getting flamed.
    Even here in So Cal the poz is not so thick as you might think.
    There’s hope.

    JWM

  • Auntie Analogue May 23, 2019, 10:13 PM

    Cell phones, file sharing, video streaming, and the internet, especially the post-Google/post-Bacefook internet, quantum-accelerated every deleterious trend that Neil Postman described and anticipated in Amusing Ourselves To Death.

  • Skorpion May 24, 2019, 10:47 AM

    tl;dr

    /couldn’t resist it

  • JiminAlaska May 24, 2019, 10:54 AM

    Library of Alexandria.
    Today’s grand library, everything written & stored as noughts and ones; unusable, unreadable, unrecoverable if just a few links in the system are broken. EMP, sabotage, or simply a few lines of crappy code goes viral.

    The good side; all the news that’s not news published in the last half century will be lost forever.

    The bad side; if today’s Library of Alexandria crashes and burns, civilization, as we know it today, crashes and burns as well.

    Civilization, as we know it today. Hum. maybe there ain’t a bad side.

  • jwm May 24, 2019, 12:39 PM

    @Jim in Alaska. I’ve had that same thought. I imagine a future archaeologist with a thumb drive or an SD card. Or, more easily, just imagine all your family stuff was on Betamax, or 5″ floppy.

    JWM

  • ghostsniper May 24, 2019, 12:57 PM

    @Jim in Alaska, interesting thought process. I will be spending some quality time with that thought process. 20+ years so far and increasing, a big hole in the history of the world circa 21st century. A thousand years from now it will be like looking for the “missing link”. And if they find it they’ll see it wasn’t missing at all, it’s just hollow. Like anyone ever misses bickering children that need a nap.

  • Gagdad Bob November 22, 2021, 8:47 AM

    Each day it becomes easier to know what we ought to despise: what modern man admires and journalism praises. — Dávila

    • pbird July 28, 2022, 11:17 AM

      Succinct. Easy sorting.

  • PA Cat November 22, 2021, 10:48 AM

    Just for Gerard: an early Thanksgiving gift from the Babylon Bee:
    “Black, White Americans Join Hands Around Common Cause Of Launching Journalists Into The Sun:
    U.S.—In a rare moment of national unity, Americans of all races, backgrounds, and creeds have joined hands together across America around the shared belief that we should immediately launch all mainstream media journalists directly into the Sun.

    ‘I know we don’t agree on much these days, but this one’s a no-brainer,’ said Dale Smith, a white guy from Townville Tennessee. ‘I’m honestly not sure why we didn’t do this a long time ago.’

    Darnell Woodson, a black small business owner from Baltimore, agrees. ‘Wait a minute! We haven’t launched all the lyin’ journalists into the Sun yet? Well, no wonder things are so bad,’ he said.

    Citizens, experts, and policymakers all agree that gathering up the people most responsible for the racial hatred and division in this country over the last decade, loading them all into a rocket, and launching them straight into the nearest star as quickly as possible is the most effective thing we can do to promote healing in America.

    Elon Musk has announced he will dedicate one of his very own SpaceX rockets for the task. He will also dedicate a second rocket large enough to hold Brian Stelter.”

    https://babylonbee.com/news/black-white-americans-join-hands-around-common-cause-of-launching-journalists-into-the-sun

  • Occasional Commenter November 22, 2021, 4:28 PM

    “For centuries it has been unfashionable in the West to kill the messenger. ”

    If you keep killing the messenger, eventually the sender will figure out that you really don’t like the message.

  • Nori November 22, 2021, 5:56 PM

    “It’s like watching worms move in their mouths.”
    What an excellent description of the talking hairdos of tv news.
    This post has aged very well,as have the comments;what a feast.

    Wonder which Official Fact Checker of Ruling Class Media will be first to make an ass of him/her/xiself trying to prove the Babylon Bee article is mis/disinformation.

  • CCW November 22, 2021, 9:26 PM

    “For centuries it has been unfashionable in the West to kill the messenger. ”
    Apparently not in Sparta.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Prc1UfuokY

  • Sid V July 27, 2022, 5:12 PM

    I read a couple weeks back where the Philadelphia Inquirer’s circulation is down 20% in one year. It used to be a decent newspaper. Sure it was always liberal, but not exceedingly so. Now it’s nothing but woke garbage, with almost every single article shitting on white people. It seems to be their reason for existing anymore. And they never ever call out Democrats for bad behavior anymore, even while residing in one of the most corrupt cities in America.

  • foo July 27, 2022, 5:42 PM

    You are not wrong, G.

    JWM- +1 here also in SoCal.
    Progtards are getting nervous.

  • Asbestos In Obstetrics July 27, 2022, 8:43 PM

    Gaslight 24-7 happens when Omni Consumer Products owns all of the outlets.
    Picture them in clown suits or dub in honking horns or the Benny Hill theme.
    We used to overdub kung-fu movies like this, just for the laughs.