Oregon Media Insiders

Being a serious student of the human condition, I am always on the lookout for tendencies and patterns. Since I began my tumultuous career on the Oregon Media Insiders web site, I have spotted what can only be described as a most disturbing exemplar, an anti-intellectual orthodoxy that seems to have tunneled to the very core of Portland media members.

It would seem, based on the many comments attached to my various introspective postings, that being a thoughtful person is somehow a bad thing. That to express one’s simple opinion in a public forum designed to solicit said opinion is, for unfathomable reasons, some unspeakable abomination. But that is the lot of the person unafraid to speak to power. As the noted German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau once noted, “Anyone who draws attention to himself as an individual, is viewed with suspicion. We acquired this tendency, of course, from America, and we must resist it: leveling, and imitation of what others are already doing.”

The most telling phrase in the quote is Fischer-Dieskau’s reference to where the tendency was birthed – right here in the good old US of A…the land of the free and the home of the brave. One may disagree with Fischer-Dieskau’s assessment of where the problem of suspecting and fear of individuality began, but the existence of this reactionary suspicion is inarguable. All one need do is examine the responses to my commentary.

The other more troubling aspect of the OMI readership response to my wordsmithing is the repeated objection to the length of my writings. Upon close examination of the typical comments found trailing in the dust of my thoughts, one could safely assume that writing anything requiring more than a single sentence is peccant.

The thought that everything important can be easily squeezed into a brief, lazy and thoughtless manner is iniquitous. Of course, one would expect to see this attitude, this rampant ADHD running full throttle at a web site infected by mass media ghouls.

These are the producers, cocksure confident that a four-second sound bite from the resident expert is adequate. These are the reporters who ruthlessly clear-cut crucial information in order to extend their stand-up at the end of the piece. Gotta look good on the split-screen with the anchors – “Back to you, Ashley and David.”

These are the news directors whose precarious future rides on a rating point. Don’t want to explain anything to the viewer unless it can be done in under a minute. We need more time for the weatherman to cheer our glum audience. These are the executive producers who dispatch the helicopters to give us the pointless views from News Chopper 12.

I fully expect that many that read this will think of me with scorn, their anger justified by their simplistic and misguided self-awareness. Absorbing the slings and arrows flung by reactionary media aristocracy gives me increased energy and belief in the righteousness of my cause. Whenever I begin to self-doubt, I remember, with great joy, the words of GalileoGalilei

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”