Don’t Watch, Read, or Listen to Any Mainstream News

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For the longest time, I thought the secret to being a responsible consumer of news was to consume news from a variety of ideologically diverse news sources. Watch Fox News and MSNBC, listen to Rush Limbaugh and NPR, and be a frequent visitor of aggregation sites such as Real Clear Politics, Real Clear Markets, and Real Clear Education. Both sides get some of the story correct, and if you avail yourself to both sides, you should have a better understanding of what’s really going on. Right?

Wrong.

I got to believe that the ultimate purpose of news is to make one a better decision-maker. After all, the more informed one is—that is, the more one knows what’s really going on—the more likely one will make better decisions. And once one develops a knack for making wise decisions, one cannot help but become a better person and visit improvement upon one’s life, community, and country. But does consuming mainstream news responsibly, as defined above, make one a better decision-maker?

The Micro Scene

When I look at my personal life, the answer to that question is a resounding no. When I was a dedicated news junkie—the epitome of an “informed citizen”—I was piss-poor marriage material, a poor steward of my health, career, and finances, and so delusional politically, I actually thought the Republican Party was the answer to most if not all of the wrenching problems plaguing me and America. Nope, I’m a much better decision-maker and person today than I was 30 years ago, and my hard-won improvements over the last three decades have coincided perfectly with my abandonment of mainstream news. The less mainstream news I consumed, the better I became. And my advancement really accelerated once I abandoned mainstream news altogether and turned to nobody bloggers and vloggers for knowledge and wisdom. Here’s a breakdown of my very hard-won improvements.

The Macro Scene

Now let’s move from the micro scene to the macro scene. Are we Americans better decision-makers than we were three generations ago? Do we pick wiser and more ethical politicians? Are we better at child-rearing? Are we nicer to each other? Do we tinker, build, and transmit practical knowledge to our children as well as the World War II generation?

Again, the answer to the above questions is a resounding no. And here are a number of metrics that prove it.

* Gauging the decline in SAT scores ain’t easy. Test preparations, test conditions, and test measurements have changed considerably since I took the test in 1979. When I took the test back then, there were no previous tests to review and study from (the College Board didn’t start selling previously administrated tests until 1980). And test prep tools were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are today. I don’t remember any of my peers taking, say, a Kaplan prep course or purchasing an SAT study guide. We just arrived at the school gym at the designated time on the designated date and took the test. Another big difference was the use of calculators. When I took the test, calculators weren’t allowed. And if you had ADHD or some other cognitive disorder, you weren’t allotted extra time. You had the same time constraints as everyone else.

Now onto test measuring. If you click the link provided to either of the average SAT scores in the above table, you will see that the average SAT score began to decline significantly after 1964. And this decline wasn’t halted until the College Board began recalibrating the mean after 1980. In other words, getting a 1000 SAT score in the 1960s was much harder than getting a 1000 SAT score today. So the decline in average SAT scores is much more pronounced than our scores above would indicate. If the College Board never recalibrated the mean, the average SAT score today would be well under 1000.

I, of course, could go on and on about America’s growing inability to manage its collective affairs, and I will. Nothing warms the cockles of my heart more than a good rant. So here we go.

Health

In two health-related areas, Americans today are doing better than previous generations. Americans today smoke less and suffer fewer drunk-driving fatalities and injuries.  But when it comes to things such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, illicit drug use, overdose deaths, STDs, mental disorders, and suicide, Americans today are doing decidedly worse.

Finances

Today, how many two-parent families can get by on just one paycheck? When I was growing up, most two-parent families could. A working dad and a stay-at-home mom was the norm. And how many Americans today are living paycheck to paycheck? According to one source, the answer is 78 percent. There were surely a lot of Americans from my parents’ generation living paycheck to paycheck as well. But its economic insecurity was nowhere near as pronounced. My parents’ generation not only saved more, and had less consumer debt (credit cards were rare and student loans weren’t invented yet), but it was also much more likely to have a defined-benefit pension, and much more likely to have a bevy of children that could provide a DIY safety net should its savings and income in retirement be swamped by its expenses.

Civic Pride

Do Americans take pride in the way they dress and comport themselves? Do Americans take pride in the way their homes look? Do Americans take pride in the way their neighborhoods and cities look? Many Americans do, of course, perhaps most, but something’s not right. Check out the below video from CharlieBo313:

Now, admittingly, the neighborhoods recorded in the above video by Mr. Bo313 are poor and working-class neighborhoods. But where is it written that low-income people must live in squalor? And what the heck are the mayors and political leaders in these cities doing? Picking up garbage isn’t rocket science. Can’t they take the money they’re saving from defunding the police and start up-funding the sanitation department?

Social Cohesion

Do we trust each other? Do we like each other? Do we even agree on what basic words mean—such as man and woman? And, most importantly, does our ruling elite love America? When I was growing up, I had no doubt that our ruling elite did. Check out the below clip of Walter Kronkite and his coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. At the one minute mark, he’s beaming with joy, and then he proudly proclaims, “Neil Armstrong, thirty-eight-year-old American, standing on the surface of the moon.”

Now imagine if the moon landing happened today rather than 1969, and the very same players made it happen. How would our vaunted news anchor-people cover this spectacular achievement? Would they be rejoicing? Or would they be fretting over the lack of diversity in the lunar module and in the mission control center back at Houston? I have no doubt that it would be the latter coverage because our ruling elite doesn’t love America. Our ruling elite is embarrassed by America. So it would never chronicle a spectacular American achievement without reminding Americans just how wretched their country is.

Freedom

Does the typical American understand the difference between democracy (i.e., majority rule), libocracy (i.e., a constitutional republic that limits majority rule in order to safeguard the inalienable rights of all, including the politically weak), and totalitarianism (i.e., socialism, fascism, and communism)? Can the typical American identify the inherent flaws of government and thus explain why government is “a dangerous servant and a fearful master”? Is the typical American well-versed in the canon of freedom—books that include such masterpieces as The Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, and The Road to Serfdom?

The answers to the above questions are a big fat no. And the reason is depressingly simple: we don’t teach freedom in this country. This shortsightedness, in turn, is particularly egregious at the university level. Not one of our major universities offers a degree in freedom studies. But every last one of them has several degree offerings in a variety of gender and ethnic studies.

The March of Folly

But wait, it gets worse. America used to pride itself on its Yankee ingenuity—on its ability to get things done. In 1961, for instance, JFK declared that American feet would tread across the surface of the moon by the end of the decade. And sure enough, on August 20, 1969, American feet tread across the surface of the moon (see the video above).

But when was the last time an American president made a bold declaration and that bold declaration came to fruition? When was the last time our vaunted ruling elite identified a big hairy audacious goal and actually achieved it? I can’t think of one. Our ruling elite has a severe case of pompous ass syndrome—that is, our ruling elite, especially the political contingent of our ruling elite (i.e., our vaunted politicians), has the answer to everything but the solution to nothing. And here are three great examples of the pompous ass syndrome in action.

The Black-White Achievement Gap

In 1966, the landmark Coleman Report highlighted a disturbing achievement gap between black and white students. Black students didn’t do nearly as well as white students on tests measuring reading and math skills. Well, today, with more than fifty years of effort, and untold billions of extra education dollars spent to address this issue, the disturbing achievement gap remains between black and white students. And I would argue that the gap is even worse. Because now in addition to a black-white achievement gap, we also have a black-Hispanic achievement gap and a gargantuan black-Asian achievement gap.

Homelessness

For as long as I can remember, our ruling elite has been grappling with the problem of homelessness. And the drive to fix homelessness really picked up steam in the 1980s with the arrival of Comic Relief—a televised relief effort that featured many of America’s most prominent comedians. Today, our major cities spend enormous sums of money annually to address the homeless situation (see here, here, and here), and, yet, the homeless abound. Check out the following videos:

Healthcare

In 1961, my mom gave birth to me in a Queens, New York hospital and she and I stayed in that hospital for three days following the delivery. The bill for doctor and hospital combined was $150—and that bill didn’t reflect a copay or a deductible. It was the entire bill—my parents didn’t have healthcare insurance. My dad simply paid the doctor $10 a month for fifteen months.

If healthcare expenses kept pace with inflation, that $150 delivery bill would be $1,306 today. Thirteen-zero-six ain’t chicken feed, of course. But it certainly isn’t a king’s ransom. And it’s much cheaper than either an insured or uninsured vaginal birth in New York today. According to the Business Insider, the average cost of an insured vaginal birth in New York State today is $8,463, and the average cost of an uninsured vaginal birth in New York State today is $16,058.

If this doesn’t expose the pompous ass syndrome of our ruling elite, I don’t know what does. Since I was born, there have been eight major healthcare laws passed. Here they are:

1965: Medicare and Medicaid are established.
1972: Medicare coverage is expanded to include disabled persons.
1973: HMOs are created as an alternative to fee-for-service healthcare.
1985: COBRA is created so severed employees under certain circumstances would still have access to their former employer’s group healthcare insurance.
1996: HIPAA is born and Americans with pre-existing conditions get protections.
1997: The CHIP program and Medicare Part C are established.
2003: Medicare Part D is established.
2010: Obamacare is established.

All these laws were designed to get healthcare costs under control. And they have all failed miserably. Obamacare, for instance, didn’t make healthcare “affordable.” It just lessened the burden of paying for private healthcare insurance for some Americans and placed that burden on the American taxpayers.  An annual healthcare insurance premium of $20-25K for a family of four is hardly “affordable” just because the taxpayers are picking up 90 percent of that cost.

Quick aside: Why these laws failed to control healthcare costs isn’t hard to deduce. Each law made healthcare costs increasingly opaque—that is, costs would be worked out more and more between healthcare providers and insurers rather than healthcare providers and patients. Each law thus made three great cost-containment tools—price transparency, competition, and deal-hungry consumers—more alien to the healthcare industry. And what happens when you remove price transparency, competition, and deal-hungry consumers from an industry? You get screwed up incentives—which invariably lead to spiraling costs. And that’s what we see in the healthcare industry. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to over-treat, inflate prices, and game insurance codes for maximum reimbursements. Insurers, especially private ones, have every incentive to deny claims and make doctors, hospitals, and patients eat a bigger chunk of the healthcare bills generated. And insured patients have every incentive to ignore their unhealthy habits and pass most of the cost of their higher-than-necessary healthcare bills onto their co-workers or their fellow taxpayers. 

Garbage News, Garbage Decisions

Here’s a perfect example of why Americans are such poor decision-makers. The below video features Bob Lutz from a CNBC appearance in 2017, and in this video, Mr. Lutz asserts that Tesla will soon be squashed by the established automakers.

Well, here we are today and Tesla has hardly been vanquished by the likes of GM, Ford, Volkswagon, Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Mercedes. In fact, the way things are going, it looks like Tesla will be vanquishing the established automakers and ICE vehicles will be bye-bye by 2030.

So who is this sage, Bob Lutz? Bob Lutz has been intimately involved in the auto industry since 1963. During his Ford career (1974 to 1986), he rose to executive vice president of truck operations and was a member of the board of directors. During his Chrysler career (1986 to 1998), he busied himself with sales, marketing, product development, manufacturing, and procurement, and even served as the company’s president and chief operating officer for a while. And during his second GM stint (2001 to 2010), he started off as the vice-chairman of product development and ended up as the vice-chairman, special advisor design and global product development (how’s that for a title!). In other words, he was a pivotal player all during the decline of the American auto industry. In 1963, when Mr. Lutz began his automotive career, the Big Three automakers sold 87.4 percent of the cars purchased in America. Today, the Big Three’s percentage of domestic car sales is nearly half of that (44.2 percent). And that withering decline would have been even worse if the American taxpayers hadn’t bailed out the Big Three in 2009.

And, yet, this was the expert that CNBC chose to help educate its viewers on Tesla and electric cars. The guy who helped forge a corporate culture and mindset that couldn’t protect the Big Three from foreign competition was—surprise, surprise—very confident that the Big Three, despite being saddled with the same sclerotic culture and mindset, had nothing to fear from Tesla and the EV revolution. If I knew in 2017 just how corrupt and incompetent our mainstream news is, and I saw this Bob Lutz appearance back then, I would have bet the ranch on Tesla and today I’d be a very rich man.

My point here is not to pick on Mr. Lutz. All experts make mistakes. No, my point here is to show that mainstream news controls the narrative by controlling the expert-selection process. In the above example, the narrative was that Tesla was a house of cards. Left-wing news promoted this narrative by highlighting experts who believed that competition from established automakers was coming. Right-wing news promoted this narrative by highlighting experts who believed that Tesla only existed because of green-energy subsidies from the government. The notion that Tesla had battery, software, and production technology that would soon disrupt the industry didn’t fit the narrative and thus wasn’t promoted. That alternative and far-more-accurate narrative was left for nobody vloggers to promote (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

And we see this time and again from mainstream news. Take the recent hullabaloo over black America and policing. Experts on left-wing news say black Americans suffer bad policing because cops are inherently racist. Experts on right-wing news say black Americans suffer bad policing because cops are poorly trained. The underline narrative is thus the same. The problem is the cops. The notion that maybe the problem is black America—that black Americans engage in far too much crime and are more prone than other races to be combative and disrespectful when interacting with cops—is never up for consideration. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, “our mainstream news runs the gamut of narrative all the way from A to B.”

Now a question. What happens when, depending on the story, the mainstream news produces nothing but fifty shades of the same narrative? Well, if the narratives that our vaunted journalists promote are misguided or flat-out wrong, and Americans take their cue from these vaunted journalists, Americans will be lousy decision-makers.

And that’s where we are today. The narratives being pushed by our vaunted journalists are one gigantic head-fake. They distract us by sowing dissension and tribalism but lock us into the status quo by sapping our imaginations. So we keep voting Republican and Democrat. We keep enlarging the welfare state and outsourcing manufacturing. We keep maintaining troops in Western Europe, South Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. We keep letting in hundreds of thousands of unskilled “migrants” every year. And we keep sending a trillion dollars every year to an education complex that has done jack-shit to slow the advance of self-sabotage, income inequality, and the unraveling of America. We just keep making the same bad decisions year after year after year. And it doesn’t matter that America keeps going steadily downhill. It doesn’t matter that debt, dependency, degeneracy, and disunion continue to grow. All that matters is that we follow the received narratives—that we hate the right people, vote the right way, and make sure our politicians take care of the right crony capitalists and the right crony socialists. As long as those three things are satisfied, all is good.

Final Thoughts

The lefties who bring us news firmly believe that a guy in a dress being injected with female hormones is no different from a biological woman. And if you believe otherwise, you’re one of the most loathsome bigots imaginable. The righties who bring us news firmly believe that it’s an unmitigated blessing to engage in free-trade with the countries that have pathetic or non-existent environmental laws and labor laws. And if you believe otherwise, you’re one of the most unthinking, hidebound isolationists imaginable. Do you really think it’s prudent to get any of your news from any of these people?

Stay away from mainstream news. Don’t watch it, read it, or listen to it, and when your social medium of choice shoves it in your face, ignore that wanton manipulation with extreme prejudice. If you want to become a better decision-maker and a better person, question the received narrative, question the status quo, and turn to nobody bloggers, vloggers, and podcasters for guidance.

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Can mainstream news be consumed safely? Or is that question so absurd it’s tantamount to asking if cigarettes can be consumed safely? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.