If you are arrogant enough to believe that your views on life are so interesting and attractive that, for the posterity of man, you must divest yourself of their gem like qualities on a blog; then graciousness is not high on your ample set of life-skills….and I should know!!!
However, every now and then a scribe with erudite insight catches a mere blogger off guard and renders him momentarily incapacitated…why? Because a blogger (like me) tends to believe that he is the only one who “sees, hears and tells it, as it really is” and that anyone paid by the media to commentate on the same couldn’t possibly apply such self-effacing equanimity.
To come across one such example in a week is rare, to find two…downright ridiculous! Step up Tracey Barnett and Tapu Misa.
I have to admit I have sheepishly admired Tracey Barnett for some time and her excellent web site is one of the few I link to here at g8mandate. Last week on her web-site (and replicated as a piece in the N.Z. Herald) Tracey admitted to feeling an ire which serves as fuel-rods to most bloggers’ overheated note-books.
She tells of the “out of whack priorities’ that platform “the facts”, as manipulated by the baying hounds of the media and that commentators are so beholding to the zeitgeist of the daily “feed” that true analysis is deemed to be inconsequential, at least when compared with the massed adrenalin rush of championing winners and stringing up losers.
See the entire piece here http://traceybarnett.co.nz/recent.htm
If you have read the narrative, you may note that Tracey referred to a sampling of the media’s take on the waning popularity of Barack Obama’s “doomed” Presidency. She noted that Obama had in fact achieved a 96.7% pass rate for the rate of bills passed in congress during his short tenure which was higher than any other President in five decades of recording such data.
She asked:-
“What would have happened if pundits used the rate of bills passed in Congress that the President had come out to support?”
By this inference Tracey is arguing that an outcome can be manipulated to prove just about anything, providing you start with an appropriate set of analytical data…which somewhat clumsily leads me on to the second piece of journalistic insight in a week!
Cut to Monday’s N.Z. Herald and a header entitled “It’s time to measure what really matters” by Tapu Misa http://tinyurl.com/yfmflzp
It was as if Miss Misa was carrying on where Tracey left off. This time it was the analysis put forward by economists regarding the substantiation of measuring our societal worth based on the sole data exhibited by G.D.P.
Tapu noted how the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress had reported that for all the spectacular corporate results of the last ten years, it was in fact a “decade of decline for most American’s”.
I guess when it comes to analysis…it all depends who is doing the measuring, what kind of sextant they’re using and what set of charts they’re referring to…and (as Tracey Barnett might say) which of the myopic sheep out there commentating, can be bothered to find out.
