I watched some TV today (CNN) to follow the news about the terror attack in Moscow. It was unbearable, they interviewed a reporter who previously worked in Moscow. She mixed-up the airports and was describing the wrong airport of the attack. The interviewer kept asking her about the details of the wrong airport “to better understand the event”. Predictably the real reporting showed up on YouTube.
Later that evening the same channel “Hollywood squared” two talking heads pontificating about the State of Union Address and the economy. And suddenly I realized that these talking heads know as much about the american economy as their colleague knows about the Moscow airports. John Gray writes that “the wealthy can pass their lives without contact with the rest of society” and it’s not just an abstraction anymore. These very people, living here in a virtual sense only, they are telling us about the local geography?
Later that evening I caught a few minutes of Rudy Giuliani on Piers Morgan who asked Rudy about the Wall St. bonuses. Rudy said that as a mayor of New York he loved Wall St. bonuses because he could collect taxes, etc. and then Rudy went into a predictable capitalist cheer-leading jive, showing the man of the people gone completely out of touch. Piers Morgan had the smarts and the decency (something Larry King lacked permanently) to ask: “But these are the same people who brought down the economy…” – in response Rudy mumbled some pre-rehearsed formulas.
This morning, a financial analyst named Tobias Levkovitch picking the economic sector trends on CNCB: “I don’t think the world changed that much in the last 30-40 years” – nobody laughs.
Further reading: