Dowbrigade

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from NASA

One of the things that most bothers the Dowbrigade about this
blogging business is the seeming lack of correlation between the time and
effort we put into a posting and the number of people who read it.

Regularly, some bizarre story catches our eye in a spare moment
between errands and classes, and we add a sentence or two of wry commentary
and a tangentially related photo ripped from Google image search and
slap it up on the Dowbrigade as we run out the door. When we next get
to a computer a few hours later we check and see – it has been read 5,000
times!

And then when we sweat blood on a heartfelt missive,
doing multiple rewrites, tossing and turning at night to think of the
perfect turn of phrase,
polish and pare the prose, what happens? We usually get a total of about
a dozen reads.

Case in point: the two postings we ran up the flagpole
this afternoon.
The
first, a brilliant analysis of the catastrophic failure of big media
to hold up its end of the American Compact, has been read a grand total
of 39 times.  The other, posted a couple of hours later and titled
"Slayer Pants onto Phone," a quickie about a woman who taught her German
shepard to call 911, has 465 reads!

Sometimes the difference is even more marked. Our all-time most
popular posting, a single paragraph form a New York Times story about an eating
contest, has been read over 50,000 times.  Most of our favorite
postings never break 100.

Of course, those 100 readers are the discerning few,
the regular commentor’s and fellow travelers. The rest are carpetbaggers
who probably found the
Dowbrigade by Googling "Boobs". Rationalization number two is that if
a silly post draws 5,000 thrill seekers, and just 1% stick around to
read another posting, that is 50 new readers.

One of our savvy confidants tells us the keys are the
headline and the picture.  So as way of a sort of experiment, we
have decided to pack this posting with as many hot buzzwords in the title
as possible.  If
this friend’s theory is correct, we should get an avalanche of hits. Let
the flow begin….

Imagine if
those canines
could
be
trained to call 911 in case of an emergency, a sudden heart attack or
stroke, for example. Remember how many times little Timmy got trapped,
stuck, captured or hurt?  Lassie could run away home to get help.
Today’s dogs are trapped in homes and apartments. Think of the lives
that could be saved if they could call for help!

Ah, the theory is good, but the practice is a bitch…

A US woman who ended up with three police cars outside
her home claims she was teaching her dog to dial 911.

Sylvia D’Antonio, 46, of Lake Parsippany, New Jersey, was charged with
disorderly conduct for making three late night 911 calls.

But she insists the calls were made by Slayer, her German shephard, reports
the Asbury Park Press.

A police dispatcher was alarmed because when the calls were picked
up "the
only communication was someone breathing".

The calls were traced and three squad cars raced to D’Antonio’s home
where they found there was no emergency.

D’Antonio claimed she told Slayer how to dial 911 in an emergency and
the dog got the number right.

"She knocks it off the hook and then she steps on it," she said.

from Ananova

The
collapse of the Fourth Estate and the failure of the American press to
perform the sacred mission with which it was entrusted by the Founding
FAthers is more than a scandal. It is a threat to our form of government
and threatens to bring down the entire structure of the
American Experiment by removing one of the fundamental pillars of its
superstructure.

The traditional role of the press; to make distant events seem immediate,
to open the eyes of the public to things they wouldn’t otherwise be aware
of, to put things into context and to demystify them so that ordinary
people can get a handle on them, and to keep politicians honest has been
a cornerstone of our free society since it’s inception.

Today, the sad truth is that most Americans spend much more time obsessing
over the latest missing blond or the emotional state of their favorite
ballplayer than thinking about the thousands of men of principle (just
because we don’t share those principals doesn’t mean they don’t exist)
who have committed their lives to killing as many of us as possible while
destroying our country and everything it stands for, or the thousands
of innocent men, women and especially children who are dying EVERT DAY
in genocide and famine in hellholes like Niger, Dafur, and the Sudan.

Well heck, it is a lot more FUN to worry about Manny or Jennifer, and
anyway, who really understands what is going on in Africa, much less what
to do about it? It’s depressing to even think about it!

For better or worse, this is the way a majority of Americans think. In
the final analysis, this is the responsibility, and critical historic
failure, of the American Press. The modern Media Monopoly into which the
American Press has morphed has failed abysmally in its traditional responsibility
to explain and expose the issues of substance to the general population.

What made the American system so revolutionary 250 years ago, and remains
so today, is the proposition that the PEOPLE are WISE, in their aggregate
judgment, and have an uncanny intuition as to their true interests in
almost any situation or circumstance.

But for this intuition to come into play, they need good information;
good both in form and content. Form we do in spades – we have perfected
the presentation formats for 24-hr, always on news, TV news magazines,
boutique news on the internet, talk TV, talk radio, online chat, discussion
boards and blogs.

Ah, but the content….What is all the talk ABOUT? Who sets the agenda?
Who decides what is worthy of attention? Therein lies the rub, to paraphrase
the bard.

The average, overscheduled American has only so many spare moments
in his or her day to think about things other than those directly related
to navigating between job, family and community commitments. By filling
90% of that particular precious partial attention track with mental fluff
and eye candy, the media is doing a tremendous, perhaps fatal disservice
to our very way of life.

We have, in the past, been decried for raising alarms without offering
solutions. What are we proposing the press do to make Dafur less depressing
to the American palate? We are not advocating plopping Paris Hilton down
in Mogadishu in some famine-themed reality show, or some sick game show
in which mothers of starving children beat the stuffing out of each other
for a cup of rice, but there must be some way to make the stark realities
of the world we live in palatable, confrontable, perhaps even comprehensible.
There must be some way to suggest or inspire people to find solutions
to the very real, pressing problems of our times.

People WANT to do the right thing. They just need good information and
somebody to show them where to start. If the monopoly inheritors of the
traditions of the American press aren’t up to the task, then we must find
somebody who is, and fast. The clock is ticking on the American Dream.