The Media Party

 Most free countries have the basic liberal versus conservative parties with others more or less the same colours ranting on, on either side. It's nothing new to say that the media, or news folk, feed on what goes on between the two, and have panels of "experts" go on and on about their opinions. Lately, however, well, lately in terms of forever, the media experts hold far more power than we or they believe they have. First of all, if you are invited to speak on a panel, you get free advertising. I note that now, some of the panel members of my favorite radio, yes, radio station, also get a free ad for whom they work or their own business, when introduced sitting on a panel. Somehow, that doesn't add credibility to me, the listener. When I hear such, I wonder if that is why the individual allows themselves to be interviewed about his/her opinion. Cross the country ads are pretty costly. Is it a form of pay to appear? Well, that's just me doing my critiquing of what I see and hear these days. What got to me this morning listening to my favorite station, the one that we all pay for in our tax buck, or bird, is that the persons being interviewed in a serious vein were reporters. Reporting to me, is merely objectively telling what the elected members of our parliamentary system are doing. But now, it seems that the reporters have become the experts and their opinions have become far more than reporting. They have bias. I am not criticizing; I am reporting what I hear being reported. Heresay of a form? Perhaps. This concerns me because these days, people don't seem to want to read words, they want most everything pumped into their ears while they are doing other things. You carry with you, everyday and every minute, a rather dangerous, in some ways, object. It's called a cell phone. Podcasts and video ops and minute to minute broadcasts and articles and books can be  spoken into your ear, thus your brain. That may seem an innocent endeavor to you, but to me, a constant rendering of sounds into your ear is close to brainwashing. Someone, like ancient me, who remembers real posters with powerful messages on walls regarding the war  were powerful and remembered. World War Two, is what it was called and the entire world, split in two, was seeing mostly young males, weaponing at each other and killing off thousands. Now we have "little" wars and the media has its trucks and mics and brave reporters all over it making videos and so on, while the rest of us go about our business checking out "the war over there" from time to time on our phones. Huh? HUH? There is something off balance here. In this country, I live on the West Coast or the Wet Coast, as our snowed in eastern side calls us, and what goes on in Ottawa is, to the majority of us,  something as far away as a foreign land. It hasn't a lot of meaning, most of it. It's a sort of video game at arms length and we hear the odd familiar name here and there but we don't pay a lot of attention to it and it doesn't seem to us either.  Oh, there are the few passionate political guys but the rest of us worry more about what we can do something about such as the rent or mortgage payment next month and the grocery bill and how our kids are doing and dealing with warnings survival of the planet. What we want here, far away from the latest investigations into things that appear and disappear when the media tires of it, or the planning that seems to be bigger than the doing. Excuse me, I need a cappuccino.