The New York Times had a fascinating story on its editorial page today about American's awareness of how things work in congress and how ignorant many people are about how their representatives vote. Only 26% know how many votes it takes to break a Senate filibuster. And, only 32% know that no republican senators voted for the health care bill. The numbers are even more dismal in the 18-29 age demographic. I would bet many more people know how much money the movie 'Avatar' has raked in! Time for the schools to fire up those Civics classes. I know that immigrants who become citizens know much more about how our government works than the rank and file American.
The Albuquerque Journal negativity columnist Thom Cole outed me as a retired official of the Richardson administration in the paper today because I criticized the Journal in this blog for wanting people to come up with new negative slogans for our state. I guess being a retired public servant is a bad thing in his mind. Well, I still like him although I do get tired of his continued rewriting of stories that are aimed at the Governor. I mean, how many times can your rearrange the facts to make it look like a new story? I would like him and his editors to actually find some new facts to enlighten us with. Maybe start at the State Land Office.
I have one idea for the Journal. Maybe they could do a daily factoid on the comics page about how our government works. They could become a civics teacher and it would be a great public service.
4 comments:
Hey, Jim. I like your style and blog.
The reason we don't return remarks to Tom Cole is we stopped having name calling contests in Jr, High School. We actually have lives with jobs and families and don't have time to involve ourselves with this petty crap! I looked up some facts online and thought you might find them interesting. Alan Mutter concludes that if publishers pursuing a business-as-usual approach may find their current operations to be unsustainably unprofitable within 5years and suggests that some variables in the calculations could change, though; advertising rates could suddenly start rising. Then it states that if you believe that they'd reccomend a 12-step program. A funny quote was also in this article that stated that 93% of all newspaper sales "can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day's date in filmed ransom demands." This was reported by The Onion in a spoof of the industry's downturn. So this approach they have of printing only the Republican side of the story and always condemning Governor Richardson and everyone associated with him, is getting old really quick. They are a large number of us who intend to let them know how tired we are of it by not subscribing to the Journal. We feel the way to convey our message is to affect their bottom line. I urge anyone who is as fed up with this paper to join us in boycotting the Journal. Perhaps when they become one of the 11 newspapers that have closed since March 2007, they will remember how tired of their style of journalism everyone was.
Albuquerque Journal: "All the news that fits, we print."
Ammended -
"All the news that fits our ideological point of view, we print"
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