Some years ago - in the 1980s - 2000s range - there was a professor at some smallish university who annually issued his list of the most ignored news topics. This annual list - which the national wire services would pick up and run - always leaned way left.
And the irony was that while these were usually fairly obscure topics, they were nevertheless topics our crusading professor apparently only knew about in the first place because SOME news outlet HAD covered them, because the list always included references to prove they were real topics.
So they weren’t actually ignored topics (just like the American Library Association’s much-ballyhooed “Banned Books” aren’t actually banned), it’s just that he was out of step with the news judgment of actual working editors and reporters who didn’t assign the same weight to these topics as he did.
I have my own list - topics that get some coverage, but probably more on Substack than in the New York Times or on NBC. My list is covered in the legacy media, but usually in short pieces that generally downplay the severity of the issues involved.
Here it is:
National debt
Decline in quality of education
Mainstreaming of anti-Semitism
Erosion of free speech in democracies
Amount of our economy devoted to entertainment
Space junk in low orbit
The last one is heavily reported in space-related outlets, but it is already affecting our ability to put new satellites into orbit - and even to transit low-orbit en route to the moon or elsewhere in the solar system. The mainstream media outlets don’t usually report on it unless the International Space Station or another major mission has to adjust course to avoid the remnants of a previous satellite collision.
The first five are far bigger threats to our nation - and our allies - than the bogeymen both parties like to trot out.
No. 1 speaks to itself. We now spend close to $1 trillion per year just paying interest on the national debt. That will only grow.
No. 2 is generally overlooked - but even Harvard admitted in a report last week that grade inflation is deflating the quality and caliber of a Harvard degree.
My mom passed last year at age 85. When she graduated from a Catholic high school in the 1950s, she could read, write and speak ancient Latin and Greek (plus modern Church Latin and French), perform calculus, and had read much of the Great Literature of the Western world. She also had a working knowledge of physics and chemistry, as well as U.S. and world history.
You can now earn a degree in American literature from many universities without ever reading Crane, Twain or Hemingway - the three authors who did the most to advance the style of American fiction as separate from British.
(Predictably, the current crop of Harvard students are claiming the report is distorted and unfair, and somebody better apologize or else!)
No. 3 just makes me want to sigh. In just a few years, we’ve gone from “never again” to “hear we go again” - and the national media (which blithely assured Americans there was no Holocaust going on in the 1930s until Patton’s Third Army began liberating the camps in 1945) today assures us that crowds of masked agitators chanting “Go back to Berlin” are just peace-loving “pro-Palestinians.”
No. 4 is a disgrace - but when we had NBC and New York Times reporters reaching out to Twitter during COVID demanding to know why this or that account hadn’t been shut down for promoting “misinformation”, well, clearly free speech isn’t actually all that important. A millionaire getting suspended from his cushy job on late-night TV for blatantly lying about the identity of the Charlie Kirk murderer is about the only time we’ve seen the media get fired up about “government censorship” - while when the nation’s leading statistical epidemiologist was being silenced on Twitter at the personal behest of the Biden White House, there was no outcry. You might think the most storied researcher into how epidemics spread might have more to offer the national discourse than a failed comedian who got his start showing braless women bouncing on trampolines - but hey, that’s just me. (For the record, neither administration has any place telling private companies who to allow on their platforms - the Supreme Court got that one wrong.)
And No. 5 is a story that is usually just ignored - even as more than 85 percent of colleges now charge their non-scholarship students an “athletic use fee” to underwrite their athletic departments. Only about 20 universities so much as break even on sports, and that number is likely to decline after an idiot judge - who apparently doesn’t realize that budgets also have an expenditures section - ordered all colleges to start paying their athletes.
Considering that the average university is losing between $12 million and $20 million a year (depending whether it competes in the NCAA or NAIA), the only place these schools can find that money is by charging non-scholarship students ever-higher fees. And all that Name Image Likeness money alumni are donating to attack top athletes to their alma mater? Much of it is coming at the expense of their previous donations to the schools.
At a time that a university and college education is increasingly out of reach of even middle-class families, that judge’s ruling is the very definition of injustice.
But it’s not just college sports: Pro sports continue to get ever larger contracts from TV networks and streaming services, legalized sports gambling siphons billions out of the pockets of working-class and middle-class families each year, Hollywood continues to generate obscene sums, and we have the top touring acts making millions of dollars per concert.
That’s all money unavailable for investing in new companies, new technology, new industries.
New jobs.
It’s an unsustainable model.
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