CNN keeps on insulting those who endured the black-outs.

[madfloridian]

At least in my opinion. I hate black-outs myself. I get irritable, and though I may not let it show....I feel a lot of anger. I do not feel it is an "experience" from which to learn my neighbors care. I do not feel it is necessary to have a black-out to bring out kindness in people.

I think it is awful for the news to keep patting all of you on the head for being good, instead of being angry for you.

I know I said this yesterday, too. But the first thing when I turned on the news today....Kira's grinning face saying something along these lines:
Though the black-out may have been hard on other states, (paraphrased), New Yorkers handled it admirably.....then she turned it over to someone who lavished praise about all the kindness shown.

Not a word about any crises that may have occurred. Not a word about the anger you guys must have felt. It is condescending.

The news media should be angry, too. Sometimes I never want to see Kira's grinning little face again. I don't want to see people who slept on a hard sidewalk of concrete being manipulated on camera, trying to get them to say what a good experience it was.

I think I need more coffee.


:donut:

[tom_paine]

1. I don't even watch that shit anymore...

turned off my cable. Even when it goes back on for football season all Corporate TV Pravda have "channel deleted".

Newspapers are the last remaining shreds of integrity and truth in the whole spectrum left and how much longer can they hold on?

[bearded_cat]

2. I don't watch it either

I tried to watch the Sunday morning "news" shows, but couldn't stand it for more than a few minutes. Newspapers - I wonder what the total circulation numbers are now compared to 10 years ago.

[Nay]

8. I also have stopped watching such stuff. I also think it's

condescending and self-congratulatory at the same time. Plus,haven't we just had ENOUGH of the whole "human interest story" kind of items run endlessly and tiresomely on every news station and in every mag and newspaper? It's overkill.

I used to like to read one or two "human interest" stories about an event, but jeeez, do we have to be subjected to hundreds over the next two months? Doesn't anybody want to find out exactly what happened to the Ohio power lines/substations, listen to the debate about what to do, and then collectively decide how to fix the problem? How are hundreds of "human interest" stories going to help things? I can see that a few of the stories can elicit reactions, and then action, from those of us who are primarily motivated by our emotions, but AFTER the stories, or along with the stories, we need the FACTS so we can fix the problem. Oh, well. Guess I'm too rational.

[aquart]

3. Pissed you off, too?

They oughta stop listening to Falwell and Rush.

For everyone in New York, we've been thru worse. That's it. We've been tested and we know who we are.

Hell, I knew before 9/11.

The point of civilization is that we help each other survive. The law of the jungle crap is for insects. Most of us are not insects.

[Divernan]

4. Yeah! I'd like to hear an estimate of financial losses.

I went through several power outages in summer - one for four days. I tried to salvage a lot of food in my side-be-side refrigerator/freezer by buying bags of ice, but that didn't work. It cost me a couple of hundred dollars - and then there was the added cost of going out to eat, and going to movie theaters in neighboring communities just to sit in some air conditioning.
How many people? Maybe millions? suffered financial losses?

If a power outage results from a natural phenomenon, there's no liability on the part of the utility company. But if it is their fault, you can file a complaint with the state public utility commission.
That's one reason the utility companies will always blow customers off by saying power losses were caused by lightening striking a transformer. I've fought it out with Duquesne Light/Pittsburgh for a small manufacturing business which suffered tens of thousands of dollars of losses from repeated power outages. We got the weather reports from the National Weather Service to prove that there had been no rain or storms, let alone lightening, on the days the power went out. The real problems were that the private utility kept adding new customers to overloaded systems and also that they were way behind on their maintenance.

[liberalhistorian]

5. And the problem with private utilities, as with any private company

performing public work, is that it's much harder to get any kind of accountability and responsibility from them at all as opposed to public utilities which have to answer to the government. And pro-business-no-matter-what-they-do repuke politicians sure as hell don't make them accountable, either.

[Mel]

6. manipulation

to keep the masses from rising up and also avoiding the issue which is that the private sector has let it's customers down and it's the fault of de-regulation going back to Poppy Bush year 1992.
I expect the people without power to be kind and not kind it makes for a nice little one spot fluff story.

What I want to know is where are the reporters like Palast? Anybody see them interview Dennis Kucinich come on it isn't that hard to put this together they don't want too.
Course, what do you expect with corporatist media what your seeing is par for the course. That's why I've turned them off.

two words:

'Fairness Doctrine'

[samsingh]

7. you make a very good point

it is patronizing

[americanstranger]

9. Maybe the reason why -

It might be because NYC has got a rep for being the City that Snarls, and all us Urban Neanderthals are just ready to whip out the Glock and kill the Starbucks kid if the foam on our latte ain't piled high enough.

Having said that, you're right. But CNN doesn't deal in news any more. They deal in propaganda and manipulation now.

New Yorkers are a whole lot more civil and caring than we've ever gotten credit for. And having said that, I'll admit that putting a bootprint on every CNN screaming head's ass would give me endless pleasure.

Simply because they don't 'get' NYC, and they never, ever will.

-as