The Oil Drum | Answering the Comfortable Questions about Energy

139 comments on Answering the Comfortable Questions about Energy

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cjwirth on June 27, 2008 - 10:25am

The PBS News Hour is a circus of obfuscating the obvious, funded by big oil and big corporations, with nary a bad word about America. Got to up the number of viewers, up the underwriters contributions, and keep the masses ignorant. It is the classic example of "you get the news you want to hear."

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Keithster100 on June 27, 2008 - 10:37am

You are joking right? PBS News Hour is nothing but left-wing, anti-American polemics that we all have to pay for unfortunately.

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mcgowanmc on June 27, 2008 - 11:07am

Whatever it is, it's boring.

Which means it's useless.

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HARM on June 27, 2008 - 2:44pm

The fact that one of you sees PBS NewsHour as right-wing corporate propaganda, while the other sees it as left-wing commie propaganda, tells me it must be pretty bias-neutral.

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whit on June 27, 2008 - 5:48pm

How about this: PBS NewsHour is often shallow. Both the corporate right wing and the commie left wing prefer shallowness. A true reckoning of our world, the real news as compared to the predigested glosses, would radically undermine the whole spectrum of truisms, right to left and top to bottom. The whole game of "here's a fragment of fact, and here are two commentators from right and left to play the game of fitting it into their traditional molds" would be over.

Did anyone see Krugman laughing at the fools who believe oil prices are due to "speculators" earlier this week on Keith Olberman? It was delightful precisely because a show or two before Olberman had ranted at length about Enron redux, and mocked all who could doubt that it's all up to speculation. Naturally, Olberman was too chickenshit to invite Krugman to straighten him out, and just let the challenge drop. But as Krugman points out in his column today, there are as many elected Republicans and Democrats on the idiots' bandwagon on this one.

Somehow our brilliant capitalist system has never bothered to educated either politicians nor newscasters about the fundamentals of its essential institutions - such as the exchanges which pretty much define what our economic system is. You'd think businesses would hold summer camps to provide remedial education - except the businesses welcome the shallowness too.

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step back on June 27, 2008 - 6:54pm

Our brilliant capitalist system has never bothered to educate either politicians or newscasters about the fundamentals of its essential institutions

I doubt that any one person knows how the whole of our system operates.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that no one wants to admit they don't know it all.

We're all too vain to admit there is something we don't understand --so vain that we won't admit it even secretly to ourselves.

Do you know how a simple pencil is made?
Milton Friedman (famous economist) used to brag that one of the advantageous "features" of our capitalist system is that no one person knows how to make a complete pencil and yet it gets made.

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JohnMashey on June 27, 2008 - 9:10pm

Well, I think Friedman's description was more complicated than that, and probably not really a good example. Many people know how to make pencils, although they might not know every detail of everything.

Still, to know, one really only need read Henry Petroski's delightful book:
The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance

Petroski is a fine writer of many engineering books, in this case, detailing the history and manufacture of a simple-seeming item we take for granted.

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BobCousins on June 28, 2008 - 7:02am

I doubt that any one person knows how the whole of our system operates.

Indeed, that is an advantage, and why the capitalist system is "successful". Distributed or network decision making allows more complexity than could be directed by a smaller group of individuals. I am just reading a book on the history of the Industrial Revolution, and the breakdown of the rigid hierarchy of guilds after the middles ages is what laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.

Network systems tend to have emergent properties which are hard to predict, unlike hierarchical systems where those in charge can dictate the shape of events. While some of these unexpected properties are beneficial, some will not be, and will then be hard to "fix" because there is no single point where the decisions are made.

Politicians are really now just observers of the system, but give the illusion that someone is "in control". It's a bit like the illusion that your consciousness controls the actions of your mind.

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jjhman on June 27, 2008 - 2:51pm

You're joking right?

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cjwirth on June 27, 2008 - 7:05pm

PBS News Hour avoids anything that is critical of U.S. public policy, until the public moves in that direction, and then it is very light critique. I've watch that pap for some 30 years, and it is not independent and gets little funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which gets little funding from the federal government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadcasting

All general audience news sources give patriotic Americans what they want to hear. It's the same in every nation. Who wants to hear that their nation stinks? PBS News Hour is an exaggerated case. Look at what they've had on Peak Oil, good grief:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june08/crude_03-04.html

Did you really get an education about Peak Oil from the above program?

The same for NPR, their Peak Oil coverage stinks, despite the fact that I have written them and they published my criticism, and then finally after a long gap Diane Rhem interviewed Matt Simmons. Google NPR and Peak Oil and you get some half-baked piece from 2004.

Finally, I don't think it is all a big conspiracy, rather most of the journalists are ignorant and smug there inside the beltway.

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sampson on June 27, 2008 - 8:24pm

Actually, PBS is nothing more than dialectics of the machiavellian order, the right and the left have the very same ideology in the final analysis.Its all about money in the end.As my kids would say - we are being 'gamed' by the media.
I bumped your score back to 31 negative comments.Your statement wasn't that inacurate, the PBS news hour is more anti-Republican to be more specific.

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Will Stewart on June 27, 2008 - 4:36pm

The PBS Newshour is public television, with some grant money from corporations. They are highly independent, and would bristle at any 'steering' of journalistic content. They are rated as the most neutral US news program, and is one news source that normally provides all sides of a subject under discussion in relatively lengthy sessions (for evening news, that is).

This one episode appeared to be one particular slice of 'experts', as I have seen other Newshour segments that delved into supply and demand, and the subject of peaking, albeit with all sides chiming in.

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cjwirth on June 27, 2008 - 7:58pm

No news sources are independent, in particular the PBS Newshour, for a lack of information about what drives U.S. foreign policy and oil policy. On the Newshour they are all "terrorists," never are they called resource nationalists, or revolutionaries. The U.S. military is shown to be spreading freedom, instead of stealing oil from whom ever it can.

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SanderO on June 27, 2008 - 10:28pm

Actually there are issues where there is really only one side to the story and when there are alternate views presented for the sake of balance, a whacko idea is elevated in standing.

We got the whole debate about Iraq that way and the notion of balance distorts the facts more than it provides for context.

The News Hour is corporate driven America first swill.

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cjwirth on June 28, 2008 - 12:04am

Yep, I can see Jim there debating whether Peak Oil is fact or theory.
He could have on some nut on representing the abiotic theory of oil and Dan Yergin arguing that oil is biotic, but that there is still plenty down there, so not to worry. And that is all you need to know about Peak Oil. Poor Jim, Peak Oil will really get to him. After all, America can accomplish anything if we just bring our technology, ingenuity, determinism, and cooperative spirit to the task. Poor Jim, he won't know what to do.

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