How the Reputtion of a Place Can Be Destroyed by the Press

The press here is doing their own form of making an icon, Obama is his name and he is an incompetent nincompoop. but the media has chosen him as our next president irregardless of qualifications.

What you have done here is exactly what you accuse the press of. You create a gross oversimplification of a mind numbingly complex subject (such as the behavior of a human being), and then package that caricature in a few insulting words. Naples is a grubby mess. Sicily is a remote unsophisticated backwater run by the Mafia. Obama is an incompetent nincompoop. This kind of sloppy shorthand is not surprising - it is the currency in which most political discussion occurs. The mastery of the imprecise use of language is an important tool for people who want to deceive, or who want to be deceived. If what you say is vague enough you will never be proved wrong.

Somehow I guess that you don't follow news and politics very much, because if you did you would have noticed by now that the press likes to build up a candidate for a while, call them the front runner, and then if they do start to pull ahead they tear them down. The media does have a bias but it is not generally so much left v right as it is excitement v information. Right now we are in the part of the cycle where the media is building Obama up. Two months ago we had five weeks of Rev. Wright, and the press informed us that Obama was mortally wounded. He had been pulling too far ahead of Hillary and the media wanted to keep that race going to boost their ratings.

In another two months if Obama is too far ahead of McCain, you'll probably hear the press get fixated on terrorist attacks and change the story to his 'youth and inexperience'. If McCain is pulling ahead you'll start to hear more about his age and mis-statements. The pundits will tell us that it's an open secret around the senate that he's actually an incompetent nincompoop when it comes to foreign policy, but they let him claim to be an expert out of respect for his past heroism and out of fear of his volcanic temper tantrums. They always have a 'story' to tell, usually a grossly oversimplified one, and then they come up with a short catchy 'name' for the story. So the real facts get shoehorned into a convenient story line, the story line gets crammed into a buzzword. Political discussions become strings of buzzwords.

Most news people are what we would call educated - they have gone to college and earned a degree in something (probably journalism). Since most polling show Obama leading among 'educated' voters, it would be surprising if were not the personal favorite among journalists. But as a group the news media is a completely different beast. What ever values and beliefs they may have as individuals, as a group the have all the moral stature of the crowd of kids behind the high school gym chanting 'fight...fight...fight'. The news does have a clear bias - keep the excitement at a fever pitch so you'll stick around for the Viagra and Geico commercials.

So is Obama an incompetent nincompoop? He doesn't appear to be. I heard him speak a few times and I've never heard him show his ignorance by using a non-word like 'irregardless'. He may not be (as some have claimed) the greatest orator of our time, but he is certainly a very competent speaker. He appears to be able to think on his feet. My understanding is that he has a fairly good education.

Maybe you don't like him, maybe you have some valid reasons for your dislike, and maybe you believe that he would not make a good president, but your case would be stronger if you had something more concrete to offer than the unsubstantiated assertion that he is a poopoohead.

Hey don't get to down about naples and the press

Often the opposite to what the press reports is what the people hear.

When the press report the capture or trial of mafia, they often make the place seem bad but most people I know are really happy to hear that there are really honest people there too, and that the place isn't how the press are presenting it because these people have sort out the evil and destroyed it. We see these things as not just little victories but physical demonstrations that Sicily really is a nice place with nice people.

Hello Rosy

I always thought the local name for the gangsters was not the 'Mafia', but the 'Cosa Nostra'.

Kind Regards....

Hi Spark,

evil has several names...the hope is it will stop existing.

Rosy

yeah, that's the american stereotype for Sicily. Of course a lot of Europeans think that New York is all NYC. I've heard about the problems in Naples and that the Roma are having a hard time in Italy. Beyond that I think that the more reading one does and the better the education, especially in critical thinking, the less likely stereotypes are to take hold.

On the other hand people seem to try to simplify their lives by catagorizing things, including other people. So stereotypes persist.

But I have to ask, what on earth is CERN doing in Sicily? Seems to be a rather remote corner of the world for particle physics.

I agree stereotypes are an ugly thing. You loose some of your "freeness of speech" on this topic by applying stereotypes in your signature line.