The (Liberal) Truth

I'm sick of it. Sick and tired of it.

Tired of being lumped in as the "liberal media."

Enough. No more.

I'm sick of being distrusted. I'm sick of people imposing unnecessary rules to protect others from the big, bad reporters out there. I'm sick of being blamed for exposing something that many people would have rather not known about, being blissfully unaware of the problems that surround them.

Here's the way I see it: We're the media. Our political beliefs are no one's business but our own.

The problem becomes that we reporters and journalists end up being lumped in with commentators and interviewers. People like Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly. Neither is a true "journalist" in the sense that they're going out and reporting on the news. They are interviewers, and each has his own agenda that their networks encourage.

But for the rest of us, the so-called "ink stained wretches" who still work on the ground, doing the reporting, there is no agenda. We're not allowed to have one.

Most newspapers have ethical guidelines that its reporters must adhere to. Everything from not signing political petitions to not publicly supporting a political candidate to watching what and how you say things in social media. Me writing this could be considered a breach ... if I were still working full-time for a media company.

The other thing that people always accuse journalists of is that we're out to get people. Trust me, if we were, we likely would find reason to be "out to get" them. Most of the people who end up being portrayed negatively in the news did something on their own to get themselves there. No one was out to get Bernie Madoff, he got himself in trouble all by his lonesome. And no one in the legitimate media was hoping that starlets like Lindsey Lohan go nuts or end up in jail (though, yeah, we do have our laughs about it).

In fact, if you want to see the framework of the ethical code most of us live under, check out the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics.

Oh, but what of the editorial pages, you may ask? What about them? None of the grunts whose names appear on top of the stories write them. And even if we did, they would be dictated by a faceless editorial board (in most cases) that is picked to reflect either the publisher/company's point of view (such as the OC Register's Libertarian influences, the Wall St. Journal's Conservative or the NY Times' Liberal). Any bias that most newspapers display are on those pages ... not on the news pages.

Sigh, ya, I'm a little upset while writing this. I try not to write upset, but sometimes it helps to get the feelings out. And yeah, there was an incident that spurred it on, but I'm not going to get into it, because the people who caused aren't worth the trouble.

Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. Hope you're checking out my blogs over at Loma Linda Patch as well. This one didn't seem to fit in what I write about over there. But I promise to keep going in both places as the muse hits me.

Commercial Insanity

So, we all watch too much TV.

Don't lie. You know you do.

And as a part of watching TV, you have to sit through commercials. Some work, some don't and sometimes you end up laughing at it ... and not because it was funny.

For example, there's a commercial airing right now behind me for a local career college. Those are a staple of the cable afternoon. But this one just made me scratch my head.

It's of a woman and her daughter in their kitchen. The mom explains that her daughter is her hero.

Why?

Because, it turns out, her daughter didn't get her high school diploma, but this college was helping her get on a path to a career.

Whaaaaaa?

Why the hell doesn't your daughter have a high school diploma? And why is she your hero for not having one?

I know that the implication is that you're proud of her for not winding up making her money dancing around a pole for a living ... but hero? C'mon.

I'd go on a long tirade about how this commercial is destroying America, and our future ... OK, yeah, I'm going to.

You see, has it gotten to that point in American households? Do some parents today work so hard at not being just like their parents, that it was OK to celebrate her not having a high school diploma?

This is where I curse the day that it became cheap enough for sports leagues to start handing out medals to every kid who played. You shouldn't get a medal just for showing up.

"It doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game" is true in its most honest sense. You always should be trying your best at whatever you do. But by giving out medals to everyone, that whole doesn't matter part gets amplified.

We should be striving to win every day. Whether its in the sports arenas or classrooms, the fact that we stopped keeping score, started saying everyone wins and stopped pushing that winning attitude is not helping our cause as a nation. Instead of trying to find ways to win as a team, we're working together as two enemies who were forced to be a tag team during a WWE show. It's a doomed enterprise.

Watching Little League games the last week, two thoughts immediately came to me along these lines. First was, "God, I thought we were better than this, even at this age."

The second was, where was the competitive fire. I'm not expecting a kid to throw his glove down to the ground like Tanner from "The Bad News Bears," but something. Some sort of team spirit. Some sort of in the trenches battling for a common goal.

Of course, so much has been taken away from the kids today. No more on-deck circles. No more infield chatter ("Hey, batter" was ruled to be taunting, and no one thinks to talk to each other). Pitch counts that interrupt the flow of the game (we always had weekly inning limits).

They're just kids, I know. And no one wants the abuses of the past from overzealous parents -- I've seen plenty of them in action.

But we should be expecting more from our children than "she turned her life around after not getting her diploma, so she's my hero."

Support is one thing. Outright delusion is another.