Saturday, April 18, 2009

Bill and Yang

It was an interesting end to a sort of media filled day today. A day that began with me watching a documentary on the media in China on that fine German-French channel, 'ARTE and ended with me watching the documentary"Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" on the new iMac, and some conclusions were made. Firstly, the evidence would seem to suggest that that democracy "par excellence" across the Atlantic, is, at best, a much lessor democracy than the majority of its citizens are led to believe. Indeed, one might even argue that the American media is about as "free" as its counterpart in the Middle Kingdom. Nevertheless, it was my encounter with Bill O'Reilly, a rather, unpleasant, obnoxious loud mouthed right wing nutter who serves as an anchorman for Fox, that had me making a more specific comparison and my mind went back to Beijing's Yang Rui, who hosts CCTV 9's 'Dialogue', and I thought, where do these two twats actually differ? Yang Rui, can be extremely smug and downright condescending when it comes to towing the party line and spouting out his "jingoistic" nonsense, and Bill? Well, you might want to watch him interview Jeremy M Click, who lost his father in 9/11; Bill is not only rude, smug and condescending, he is also arrogant, aggressive and threatening. Yes, Yang and Bill, and I cannot thing of more appropriate ambassadors for their respective countries.
Of course, there are mainstream channels, like 'ARTE' and '3 SAT', here in Germany that facilitate good objective, journalism. Moreover, the battle for the web is still going in China, the United States and elsewhere. It is time to pick up the remote control, time to think, and time to stop listening to the drivel that the "Yangs" and "Bills" spout and when we stop listening to them, perhaps, we will stop listening to their political masters.
Picture: Yang's 'Dialogue' is looking for guests. Bill interviewing Yang and Yang interviewing Bill that should be worth a laugh or two at least.

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