0561 - SpotNews

While our Staff has its specialists, we don’t have a Prognosticator. This week, we had planned to carry on about the practice of all news organizations planting their hapless reporters outside in uncomfortable places to give an air of immediacy to their tales. The reporter on the White House lawn somehow is supposed to carry more weight than if he (or she) was sitting at a desk. On CNBC, our Revered Investment Guru reports, no Federal Reserve announcement is complete without the hapless reporter stationed outside the Fed’s palazzo, for no good reason. Further, as the Presidential candidates flap around the U.S., CNN is putting its talk show hosts outside its bus in the wind and rain, again to no purpose. Well, that’s what we had planned to complain about, when suddenly Hurricane Charley hit this week, and every respectable weather reporter put on the rain gear and got out to show you that it is stupid to be outside in a hurricane. And so, yes we see now, it is.

Here at the Objective Observatory in remote Anguilla, we are, we confess, news junkies. We hunger for connection to the larger world. The TV is on at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and often in between, and we find that we are by no means unusual in our Anguilla viewing habits. (We don’t watch cricket, though, and we have strong moral grounds for barring anything called – falsely – “Reality TV”.) Although news is fine brain food, and fresh news is tastier, we don’t see that making the reporter uncomfortable is any use at all. Listen up, CNN, NBC, et alia, we know it is wet and dangerous in a storm. You don’t have to sacrifice a live reporter on the altar of immediacy. Of course, if you could manage to lure that self-righteous prig Ralph Nader out into a brisk Class 4 hurricane and he got blown away for good – well, that’s the game.

And speaking of the political race, we must say that the repetition is getting boring. We know that standard doctrine is that a candidate must “Stay on Message” (SOM?), but when the message has been reduced to a slogan that is almost meaningless, we are not illuminated. We don’t want to hear any more that the war in Iraq is part of – nay, the equivalent of – the war on terror. Nonsense – read the 9/11 Commission report. That mean man Saddam was not a part of the attack. Not. Stop saying he was. And, if there is any way that V.P. Cheney can be suppressed until the debates, that would be appreciated, too. He’s mean and he’s not really straightforward. He can Stay on Message forever, but it’s not true. Similarly, just to be non-partisan, we were not impressed with the Kerry position that he won’t permit nuclear waste to be buried in Nevada. Where are we supposed to bury it? Anguilla? No way; not in our back yard (“NIMBY”).

So, let’s move on to the final debates as soon as possible. They might contain some real discussion of important matters. As a suggestion, we would like to quote from page 344 of the 9/11 report: “Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies.” Amen, bipartisan brethren. The entire Iraq fiasco, daily getting more chaotic, demonstrates that no imagination (and possibly no information) was used in the planning, if there was such. We know that the CIA and most of the other alphabet soup of “Intelligence” agencies of the U.S. and the world were wrong. Reshuffling the bureaucracy will not provide brighter staffing. But how about imagination? Where’s and what’s the national budget for that? Smarts, that’s what’s needed.

Next time: Manners [OO #562]

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