Lord, have mercy! Reading some of the crap that passes for journalism will just about make you heave. You can read the same story on two different websites and come away with entirely different feelings about what happened, as well as a completely different view of what happened.
The say every story has two sides. Never is that more true than in what we laughingly call “reporting” here in the US. First and foremost, the job of a reporter is to report, as neutrally as they can manage (face it – we’re human – we have opinions) on the actual events of any given situation. Now, just look around at the titles of some of these articles. Don’t even read the article, just look at the titles.
Today, there were two articles I saw about the same thing. One was on the LA Times website, and the title was something like “Republicans block plans to prevent student loan interest rates from doubling on June 1” (July 1? – whatever). Basically, loudly proclaiming that the Republicans are pricks that don’t care about you or your education.
The next one came from a right-leaning site, the name of which escapes me right now. It was an article about the same thing (the Senate vote to invoke cloture on the student loan interest rate debate today) and the title was along the lines of “Democrats refuse to accept GOP plan to curb student loan interest rate hike”. In a nutshell, the title says “Dems are prices that don’t care about you or your education.”
Meanwhile, this doesn’t actually have a damned thing to do with education. The simple fact is that the interest rates on these loans have been artificially held down for decades, but federal regulation (those same idiots arguing over how to artificially hold it down some more). Beyond that, because of federal guarantees, more people have access to loans that they really can’t afford than ever. Also because of that, more people spend more time in school, leading to a shortage of jobs for well educated people, which has lead to the AA being useless, the BA/BS being nearly useless and a Masters landing you roughly the same position that an AA would have gotten you 30 years ago. Except that a Masters requires 5 or 6 years instead of the typical 2 for an AA, and costs you much, much more.
There’s also this great new trend that colleges started to try to keep people there longer, thus spending more money. Classes and entire courses of study dedicated to things that, while maybe interesting, are completely useless to you as a candidate for almost any job on the planet. Things like Art History, African Studies, Dance and Choreography, and Weapons of the Renaissance.
While some of these classes actually sound interesting, what career are you preparing yourself for? About the only thing you can do with a course of study like that is teach classes about that subject. That’s not a hell of a lot of job security. Why not study something that might actually give you a few options for jobs, and allow you to make a living, support yourself, and pay off the student loans?
All of this has been made possible by the Feds keeping interest rates artificially low, and guaranteeing loans to allow more and more people to go to school for longer and longer periods of time at colleges who are raising prices higher and higher. While that might sound like a good thing when you just skim the surface (more people going to college = good), it’s a horrible thing when you consider that many of those people are simply not equipped to make intelligent decisions or use common sense. As such, they get useless degrees in things that really don’t make a damned bit of difference in the job market, rack themselves up with $100k in debt that they can’t afford, default on the loan (sticking the taxpayers with the bill) and then live on food stamps or whatever jobs they can find, which have nothing to do with their course of study in the least.
So, the Feds spend money to weaken the job market, increase the cost of education, promote more “educated” people with useless degrees, increase the number of welfare recipients, and cause a decline in overall wealth and standard of living all across the nation. And they are arguing about how to do it some more, because they can’t agree on which method is best to screw us over with. All the while the media is promoting what they believe to be the right person/group/party/entity’s plan to weaken the nation and cost us all money by specifically writing pieces that they pass off as “news” that espouse the views of either themselves, their editors, or their organization as a whole.
That’s what passes for journalism in this nation today.
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