September 10, 2007--The Disinformation Society
... American culture has become self-dis-informing.
As my friend Peter Golden (blogger at Boardside) puts it so well: "When people lie, they know they are doing something wrong. But when they just make things up, there's no consciousness of right or wrong at work. It seems morally okay to live in a fantasy world -- and this is much more pernicious to the public discourse than lying."
My friends, who are mostly ex-hippie, yuppie progressives, have been locked in prayer to exorcise the evil spirit of George W. Bush for six years, but they fail to recognize a more comprehensive failure of leadership in every sector of American life, and especially in the ones where a lot ex-hippies-now-yuppies run things. Our political leadership may be deplorable, but so is our leadership in business, education, the arts, and especially the media.
The poster child for this is The New York Times. In their reporting on the world oil situation, they have consistently and uncritically swallowed the public relations handouts of Daniel Yergin's Cambridge Energy Research Group (CERA), a wholly-owned PR shop serving the oil industry. Laziness doesn't even explain this. It's bad editorial leadership. It's a failure to ask the important questions.
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary22.html
Kunstler's blog is an important supplement to his website, mainly for readers' comments.
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