Hi all,
I hope you all had a good weekend.
I had a good 14 mile run.
I went to the Gator game and we won.
Great day a rest yesterday.
I watched a terrible movie yesterday...Meet Bill.
I don't want to hear it from all you ney-sayers. This movie sucked.
It was about a miserable middle aged man. He caught his wife cheating on him. He hated his job. He hated his life.
So he wants to change so he starts hanging around a high school kid.
He starts working out, changing his look, smoking dope, sleeping around.
I thought that he was trying to make things better for himself so he can get his wife and life back together.
At the end of the movie it became evident the wife was contrite, she was interested in getting back together with him and he wanted nothing to do with her.
He wanted the "everything revolves around me...whatever makes me feel good" life.
This is the Hollywood crap that I hate.
But I have a couple of other movies at my house, so I hope they are better.
Today I wanted to talk to you about NPR.
I am all about educating myself. I also hate the radio. I don't hate the content because I love to listen to music and I love to listen to good talk radio.
But I HATE COMMERCIALS.
So many commercials, I mean the shows will come back from a commercial and say something like, "Stayed tuned because you are going to love this next segment" and then back to commercials.
I am in the car about 18 minutes and sometimes there might be 8 minutes of commercials.
So I almost swore off radio.
But I found NPR.
It is a radio station without commercials. Heaven right? Not so fast.
Okay so I have always heard about NPR but never gave it a shot. I have also heard it is a bit left winged.
I started listening and I loved it.
Let me take a step back and tell you that I don't have any problems telling you I am a very conservative guy. I am a Republican (I am sure that if you a reader of this blog you might have guessed that. I am not very political but this year I have gotten into it a little bit. I went as far as going online and making my own political bumper sticker. It says, "Barak Hussien...are you insane?!").
But I was liking the radio station. I liked it because it gave news stories about small town Joe. I reported on how the economy is affecting farmers. It reports on health care.
At first I just listened.
Now I have to admit I am not very worldly. But I am getting there. I think just before I die I might have a grasp of the way things are. In the last 10 years or so of my adulthood (and I use that term very loosely) I am beginning to understand the difference in TV stations and how they can put a spin on something to push their agenda.
But after about a month of listening to NPR I started noticing a liberal bias. It is very subtle and if you are not listening closely you may miss it.
But lately, it has been screaming to the left. I don't know if it is the election or what but I have been finding myself cringing almost every time I hear another story from NPR.
Last week I swore off NPR..
I am never going to listen to the station again. I don't care if they don't have any commercials and I don't care if I have to pay to get XM radio...I am never listening to NPR again and here is why.
You all know the trouble our troops have been having because of the Pakistanis.
This country is trying but is still a mess. They have bad dudes in the mountain regions of their country.
We know this and they know this but they do not want us fighting their battles.
But while they are not able to take care of their problems we must wait.
While we wait their bad dudes are coming into Afghanistan. They are coming into Iraq and laying down road side bombs. They are shooting at our guys and then before we can react they are running back over their countries borders and yelling, "nanny nanny nan na, you can't get us" (said in a spoiled rotten 8 year old kid voice).
This has been going on for a long time. I kind of get sick of hearing reports of when our guys are getting killed and we essentially can't fight back.
So one morning I was going to work and I put on NPR.
They were reporting an offensive that our troops were taking in Pakistan.
We went into a really bad part of town and took out some really bad dudes. We ended up killing some high level al Queida men.
Now they reported that the Defense Department did not release any information about except that it was a success.
So NPR states that they had some people down on the scene and they have some information about the battle.
Their reporters state they have talked to the people in the tribe and they have said that numerous woman and children have been killed.
Now this is where I have the problem.
"They talked to the people in the tribe."
First of all this is a town that harvests some really bad dudes. So maybe the people in the town are low level al Queida people. Maybe the Taliban realized that if they say that woman and children were killed they know they can push their agenda through our very liberal TV media (and obviously one radio station). Maybe the Taliban were using some woman and children as human shields.
The facts are so loose. Your sources are loose. But because someone over there says it doesn't mean it is true.
So do you see how biased this reporting is?
The defense dept. won't report on it because it MAY want to get all its facts but NPR has a beat on it.
They have talked to the bad guys and asked what they thought. Then they report to people that don't want to hear good news about the war. They report everything the left wants to hear.
This was just bad reporting and blatant, in your face, bias.
I read plenty of books about the fundamentalist Muslims and it says all the above. It talks about how bad these dudes are. How they will do anything...they will cheat, lie (what a concept in war),
all in the name of Allah.
This was bad reporting. It was the last straw.
I won't listen to a station that does this anymore.
I promise not to get very political in the next coming months. I wont report on the DNC or the RNC but I had to just get this off my chest. But I heard the ghost writer is working on a political blog as we speak.
Have a great Monday.
john
ps if you are someone that gets the blogs by email...I have made some mistakes in the last week.
You have to understand if you hit Enter instead of a button like, "Save as draft" it will publish your draft.
So twice you got blogs that were accidentally sent out before I was finished.
Thanks for sharing your opinion about NPR. I agree. It all sounds so soothing, doesn't it. No commercials, New Age music, and an almost perfect delivery of 'all things that are really important in this world, only NPR can do it' sort of feeling. Sort of exclusionary.
ReplyDeleteWar IS hell. For all concerned and all involved. Vietnam was my conflict. I spent a year there. No combat; just 24/7 state of alert for any sudden outbreak of violence in Saigon. Women and children were casualties of that war just like all other wars mankind has or will fought. Why the press continues to dwell and harp on it is anybodies guess. Except to get the eyes and ears of the public so that commercial messages can be sold. Or, even worse, as a public forum to push an agenda.
I suppose it's too much to ask our print and electronic media to deliver the news instead of making it up as they go along. But that is exactly what happens. Forget about the truth, just get them to watch, listen or read. Oh, and one more thing, keep attacking the far right... regardless of the cost to our nation's political and economic future. They (the press) cannot nor will not change their stripes. They readership and viewership will continue to drop.
Best, John
Kyle DeLoach