This morning as I started up my computer the MSN newsfeed flashed up on the screen with its picks for "news" stories. One of them carried the provocative title "Iowa Head Coach snubs Jill Biden invite with brutal message for First Lady and President". It comes at the heels of Iowa's NCAA women's championship game loss to LSU, which the Bidens supposedly watched. Mrs. Biden liked how Iowa played and actually did invite the Hawkeyes coach and team to the traditional White House visit usually reserved to the champion...LSU was naturally congratulated and invited as well. I wanted to find out the "brutal message" about the "snub", so I read further and discovered that Iowa coach Lisa Bluder graciously thanked Jill Biden, but said that Iowa would stick with tradition and allow the champions to go visit the President and his wife in Washington. Nothing mean or controversial or personal or political, no "brutal message" or "snub". Just a classy example of good sportsmanship and deference to the actual team that won it all. This is just one example of how the way news is presented can created division and rancor among the population. If you're someone who just goes by headlines on newsfeeds or lead-in comments on news shows to get your information, you're liable to find yourself seriously misinformed at the end of the day. These news "sources" depend upon viewer and reader interest, and so they cynically devise misleading (or, in this case false) headlines to tease you into committing to the general article or story. The network news shows pull this stunt as well by hinting at a tantalizing story later on in the show to keep you watching...when it does come up it usually is hardly discussed and isn't anything like how it was promoted earlier. Nowadays I think the big news story is the news story itself, and how American public opinion is being manipulated by hucksters to become overemotional and more and more dependent on them to get that "high", a feeling that has absolutely nothing to do with learning what's really going on in the world around them...
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