Iwo Jima, If Covered By Media Today

Iwo Jima, If Covered By Media Today

We've tolerated the media imposing their views on the news and what news we receive. We see it daily in the war on terror. Zell Miller wrote a great article on what would have happened at Iwo Jima if it were covered by today's activist media. This was written a while ago but brought to my attention again when I was reviewing all my old bookmarks. It got my juices flowing again.

I Vietnam we started allowing the media to do more than just report the news. They have evolved into activists for their own personal political agenda. That's not what they are supposed to do. Yes they still have the same rights as everyone else but they need to remember their job is to report the news not interpret it. If they want to interpret the news that's what editorials are for. Their job is Who, what, when, where, why, how, that's it. They can give their personal views of the news on an op-ed page not on the nightly news.

Activist journalists of today would have cost us WWII just as they cost us Vietnam. They are as bad as activist judges in the courts. One tries to change things by manipulating public opinion the other tries to change society to their "ideal" by legislating from the bench.

Neither is doing their job. Reporters should report the news as it occurs not as they want it to have occurred. Judges should interpret the laws as written not as they would like it to be.

We've tolerated both and now we are suffering the consequences.

The importance of independent verification to science.

For a long time I have questioned the accuracy and the veracity of studies done by environmentalists. For me this started back when scientists were claiming that we were heading to a new ice age and put forward the notion of "global cooling" Then we went to the other extreme that we have today "global warming". Dr. Michael Crichton wrote a book a couple years ago called "State of Fear" I read and enjoyed the book, as I have done so often with other Crichton books, What stuck me a different about this particular book is his personal perspective at the end of the book. I read it and guess what it made sense. For years we have tolerated "scientists" who not only decide what they will research (or the people they work for decide), they do the research, analyze the data themselves and then publish their findings themselves (most often coming to the same conclusion as their employers want. Data is skewed, left out or ignored to come to the conclusions they wanted to find or they will word their report in a way that isn't exactly a lie but it's not exactly the truth either. Much of this is based on $$. If you don't produce the results the agency who hired you wants you won't get any more grants to do more studies.

Medical studies are done in a different method and Dr. Crichton suggested in his book and to congress in 2005 a better way to do these enironmental and all scientific studies. See his testimony before the US Senate at his website http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/index.html

The suggestion in his book is simply that scientists not know who is funding their research and that they turn the data over to a third party who will analyze it and write the report.

This makes sense to me. We have tolerated those with particular agenda either for or against global cooling, global warming, the plight of the snail darter etc to not only fund but do the reasearch and then analze their own data and come up with the answer they wanted to start with. It's not really science.

We've tolerated it for way too long. Global warming is man's fault, at least that's what we've been told but if that is true, why is the temperature on Mars, Jupiter and the other planets going up at the same speed our planet is? Yeah, I know I've harped on this before. But if we had real disinterested scientific collection and analysis of the data maybe the answers would be significantly different.

We should not tolerate either end of the political spectrum to determine what is scientifically accurate and what is not. I don't mean to imply that all scientists are intellectually dishonest and out for the money but like with so much of this world today many do fall into that catagory. A double blind scientific study, as Dr. Crichton recommends in his book and alludes to in his testimony to the senate, is the only way to come up with data and analysis that we can really trust. We've tolerated money and politics determining the outcome of scientific studies for long enough and now we have data and studies that we cannot trust to make an unbiased decision. We tolerated this and it happened. Now we need to find a better way. The truth is out there if we will only search for it.