THE BREAKING NEWS YOU WON’T SEE
Time for another Gooberhead Award – presented periodically to people in the news who’ve got their tongues moving 100 miles per hour … but who forgot to put their brains in gear.
Today, I’ve got a network of Goobers for you: the honchos of NBC, CBS, and ABC. These conglomerate media barons have decreed that this year’s national political conventions are worthy of only one hour of prime-time coverage on only three nights of each convention. These conventions will produce the next president, who’ll decide everything from war to taxation – yet the corporate arbiters of our public airwaves deem it more important to broadcast reruns of sitcoms than to cover our nation’s quadrennial rituals of democracy.
The honchos say that the conventions are scripted events that are not “something we need to cover on the broadcast television network,” as ABC’s news president so regally put it. Even news icon Dan Rather of CBS, who has fought in the past for more airtime for convention coverage, now refers to them as a “money-raising, lobbyist-hunting-ground infomercial.”
Well, yes – what takes place inside the hall is a parade of pontification and posturing. But why not go outside the hall, where two huge stories of national importance are playing out?
First is the very lobbyist-hunting ground that Rather decries. It would be great TV to have investigative reporters poke their cameras into the exclusive watering holes where corporate lobbyists are schmoozing with top elected officials and blatantly buying our government. Second is the astonishing police crackdown against ordinary citizens who dare to protest at these conventions. Like a Third World dictatorship, our government now routinely uses massive and abusive force to shut down democratic expression, and it’s time for the media to expose it.
There’s breaking news right in front of these media Gooberheads … if only they had the journalistic gumption and integrity to cover it.
WHO NEEDS AMERICAN WORKERS?
Maybe you’re one of the two million Americans who’ve recently had their jobs offshored to India, Pakistan, and elsewhere, or one of the millions more expected to have your jobs shipped abroad in the next few years.
If so, don’t worry, Bucko, for a new growth industry has arisen that offers exciting job opportunities for you discarded Americans. You, too, could become an “American accent and culture trainer.” It seems that while such corporations as Citibank, Dell, GE, and Microsoft are eager to abandon the U.S. and move their telephone service jobs to low-wage workers abroad, these English-speaking foreign workers are … well, foreign, so their accents and cultural references can be jarring to U.S. customers placing orders or seeking help.
Thus, offshoring companies are hiring Americans to teach foreign replacement workers to sound and behave like Americans. Yes, this means you could end up teaching the Indian or Pakistani or Russian who was given your job how to sound like you!
Courses in American Culture 101 include U.S. history memorization, American slang, basic sports knowledge, and pop culture. Quick: What’s the Lone Star State? Who are the Florida Marlins? Can you name one talent that Britney Spears has? What’s a burrito? The lesson plans for these courses include having to watch episodes of Friends and screening such films as Bruce Almighty.
As for accents, there are voice exercises for Indians, for example, to help them lower their natural high-pitched and clipped pronunciation of English. And if the exercises are not enough, the corporate call centers use technology to filter the telephone voices of the foreign service reps, making them sound lower than they are.
Of course, it won’t be long before the corporations train low-paid foreigners to teach American accents and culture to foreign workers – then there’ll be no need for American workers at all.
This article appears in August 20 • 2004.