Increasing Frequent Flyer Mileage Vs. Increasing Understanding

THE CAMEL TOW APPROACH TO JOURNALISM

HOW ERIN BURNETT STOOPS TO CONQUER

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist

 

To say I’ve been watching a lot of the World Cup soccer games is a bit of an understatement.

I’ve watched all of them. At least all those broadcast by ESPN/ABC.

What I’ve learned is that The Netherlands (Holland) came up with the world’s first national anthem.

And like most groundbreaking things, it remains one of the best. By contrast, Chile’s national anthem sounds musically like a Big Band version of a traveling circus’ “Here Comes The Clowns” siren’s song.

Good team, bad theme.

Which brings us quite naturally to what this column was supposed to be about: Erin Burnett’s visit to Qatar to confirm her assertion that the average Qatari “doesn’t care” that they now have “Al Qaeda” in their midst.

This after the United States swapped five Haqqani Network prisoners from Guantanamo Bay for American prisoner of war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

The fact that the Haqqani Network has never tried to attack U.S. interests outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan was not mentioned in Ms. Burnett’s report.

Nor was it mentioned that the United States probably would have released these five prisoners when it ends its operations in Afghanistan in 2015 anyway – and taken nothing in return for so doing.

But the fact that the national media has not pointed this fact out – is not Erin Burnett’s fault alone. Most in the national media – including some of our vaunted elected leaders and our most celebrated prisoner of war [John McCain (R-AZ) seem to be confusing trading terrorists for hostages with redeeming enemy combatants for prisoners of war.

What President Ronald Reagan did in 1986 was trade U.S. arms for hostages – not prisoners of war. I think even Sen. McCain would admit that there is a big difference in our national moral hegemony between extracting civilian hostages and making sure no American serviceman is left behind.

What Erin Burnett hoped to prove by blowing into Qatar for one day and disingenuously trying to find one Qatari citizen to say that they don’t mind having five “Al Qaeda” among them is perhaps not even known to her or her CNN producers.

Forget the fact that the five prisoners were Haqqani – and not Al Qaeda. Ms. Burnett seems to pride herself in pulling up stakes from New York and running off half-cocked to the trouble-plagued Middle East at the drop of her high hat.

The fact that her premise was wrong from the start didn’t seem to bother her any more than such reasoning bothered President George W. Bush when he used flawed intelligence to bolster the argument for invading Iraq after 911.

And if Qatar had been free enough (and spendthrift enough) to fly a Qatari TV reporter to a Boston pub in the 1970s or 1980s – they could have done a similar report about Americans not caring whether or not Massachusetts had IRA terrorists in THEIR midst.

What Erin Burnett’s OutFront production team from CNN did in Qatar had the same journalistic significance as what Geraldo Rivera did in opening up Al Capone’s Chicago vault on live TV – absolutely none.

The most intelligent thing in the CNN report was a sound bite from the First Lady (and second wife) of the Emir of Qatar, when Sheikha Mozah told Burnett that even if everything she was telling her was true, if the United States and Qatar did do as she said they did, it probably “benefited all parties involved.”

Mark Twain said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

Maybe if Erin Burnett stayed longer in the places she was visiting journalistically-speaking, she might stop doing her level best to prove Twain wrong on this account.

It is hard to say what journalistic benefit people who regularly watch “OutFront With Erin Burnett” are getting, she is an investment banker by trade who is most famous for accusing Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of “camelcide” and for heckling Occupy Wall Street protestors on camera when the “greed is bad” protests first began in 2011.

If CNN hopes to beat Fox News in the ratings wars, it needs more news programming like Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” – and less programming like Erin Burnett’s – where just the points are unknown.

CNN’s ratings were buoyed by the nearly 24-hour-per-day coverage of the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 in the Spring, but now that Summer has arrived the Nielsen Ratings have returned to their natural order.

That order has Greta Van Susteren’s news program getting 5.6 times as many viewers as her competitor Erin Burnett.

And if Ms. Burnett’s inattentive handlers continue to allow her to manically go off on wild goose chases all over the Middle East, OutFront might be as hard to find on TV as that ill-fated airplane is to find in the Indian Ocean.

In TV as with anything else, you can’t lead from behind, and OutFront needs to show that it “gets it” if it wants to grow its market share.

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, fine artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

 

E Pluribus Unum Factor

 

http://themoderatevoice.com/195603/e-pluribus-unum-factor/

 

Word Fight At The OK Corral

A Rose By Any Other Name

View From The Virgin Islands.

 

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist

 

I spend a lot of time thinking about words.

Kind of goes with the territory if you consider yourself a writer.

And if you know your Mark Twain you know that “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Le mot juste is what the French call it – and for my money that’s the best way to say what I’m getting at – and that is partly the point, when it comes to words, the English language is the most generous foster family the world has ever known.

Albert Camus may have been ribbing Gustave Flaubert when he made one of his characters in “The Plague” so word conscious that he was never able to write more than the first sentence of a planned novel.

So if your duty calls for words, having more than one million words at your disposal certainly makes for a palette of “colors” that even the greatest artist would find daunting.

This column was supposed to be about the words that I see catapulting themselves into contention for most used high-end words of the year – and if you know me – you know I don’t like the adjective “high-end.”

Nearing the half-way point of the year, the words “traction,” “muddle” and “whiff” are near the top of “new” old words that are most used – to good and bad effect – in 2014.

I had brilliant examples of each word being used in Associated Press news articles, box office busting movies like “Django Unchained” (which I say spawned the current “muddle” fascination and even current ad campaigns for drugs such as Zyrtec “Muddle No More” is the drug’s new tagline.

But as much as I sought out the late William Safire’s “On Language” column in the Sunday New York Times, I also remember – as good as those pieces were – how they were often a struggle to finish.

As I tried to write that column what seemed even more important was keeping up with all of the new words that are coming off of today’s scrivener assembly lines. According to the Global Language Monitor (GLM) English got it’s millionth word “web 2.0” at 5:22 on June 10, 2009.

And GLM says a new word is created every 98 minutes or about 14.7 words per day. By contrast, the French language has about one-tenth the amount of words as English – weighing in at about 100,000 words.

The scientifically minded amongst us always told me English had the most words – and GLM seems to bear that out. When I did a “Word Power” quiz in a Reader’s Digest a few years back and got such marvels as “bling bling” and “beater” as the words I needed to identify with definitions – I realized that the language is constantly changing [“labile” to a word-o-phile (“logophile” for purists)] – and I needed to do more verbal calisthenics if I hoped to keep up.

The most recognized word on the planet is the brutally efficient “OK” which no one seems to agree on how to spell or its word origins in English.

Some say it goes back the newspaper printing process in Boston spelling out “oil korrect” in 1839 – others say U.S President Martin Van Buren was nicknamed “Old Kinderhook” when the campaign slogan “Old Kinderhook is OK “swept the nation – others say it is from the native American word “okeh” in the Choctaw language – and still others go further back to ancient Greece where “ola kala” means “all is well.”

But if you think “American English” is only used on this side of the pond, you only have to watch your favorite British TV show to wince through a few “don’t go there’s” and other typically U.S. urban words and expressions that have been appropriated anachronistically for use by our so-called language-conscious Redcoat cousins.

One of the most disappointing moments of my life was when I first purchased a copy of the Sunday London Times only to find out that instead of getting the deep dish and lowdown on what Mick, Keith and the Royal Family were doing – they instead had articles on Sylvester Stallone and Eddie Murphy.

So it’s not just our words that are being exported – but, as witnessed by “Big Bang Theory” being the number one TV show in America (and China) – it’s also our culture. People around the world want to know what Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Hillary Clinton are doing – maybe in THAT exact order.

The British gave birth to America – and thanks to the two things we do better than anyone in the world (TV shows and new word order) – we now instruct THEM in the proper use of the English language. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Having spent several months in a Spanish-speaking country last year – I know first-hand that many cultures and languages actually resent the would-be intrusions of English into their respective languages. English, however, does not share that compunction.

Still, in that Spanish-speaking country I noticed that the word “OK” has been adopted into their language as one of its own. I asked Spanish speakers about this at the time and they just sheepishly shrugged their shoulders in embarrassment – knowing that I had caught them in an Americanization of their hallowed language.

With the advent of social media, I didn’t want to be the one to tell them that that uber-efficient word had evolved to being one letter less – because whether you text msg, instant message or email – OK is now “k.”

OK?

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com