Information Deserts

Some of the top news stories as on the CNN.com American website this morning:

Celebs embrace the Ice bucket challenge

Look at me: 20 selfies of the week

Who recorded this actress nude?

Teen runaway hides out in Walmart for Days

Tiger Woods: No Ryder for me

At the top of the website runs a banner with the "editor's choice" story. I clicked the one in the middle entitled "Vogue icons." I opened a story about how given that Lauren Bacall died all of Madonna's vogue icons are not living. Given that the editor's jobs are to edit text or images related to many news stories, I think it says something that they picked out a story about a dead celebrity effecting the artistic nuance of an pop stars hit from the 1990s as salient. Unfortunately this selection does not indicate that it was a slow news day. In fact if you click on the international edition of CNN you get a different website. A website in which actual news features far more prominently vis a vis drivel about celebrities. Sadly, CNN is an American company. We seem to be in some sort of auto-infantilazation process, where our own media does not think we can handle reality.

In the popular imagination Rome fell due to decadence. And I'm sorry to tell you my fellow Americans, in the popular imagination of the world America is falling into the same trap. As a South African friend of mine put it back in 2012, "we are pretty sure you guys are going to go down, each of you alone at home watching porn while eating a bucket of fried chicken, wallowing in your own filth." A year later Eat24 launched it's food delivery service with the strategy of putting itself on online porn sites. Even our poor look ridiculous. In most countries poor people look like they could use something to eat. Here a lack of real food and an overabundance of high calorie-low quality "foods" make the poor notably round.

There has been much discussion of food deserts, but little discussion of the equally important issue of information deserts. If you live in rural America you may rely on Fox news, CNN and a few other sources for information about the world. If you are a farmer, you would be lucky to be able to afford the internet. The average small farmer loses money every single year. That kind of financial state makes it unlikely you will put extra gas in the truck to get over to the underfunded public library. Into the void come the screaming voices of FOX pundits full of emotion, but surprisingly empty of facts and historical analysis.

Perhaps I have too little access to information as well, for I have never even seen this issue addressed.