Where the Economic Crisis REALLY Began

A lot of folks are blaming Bush, and trying to blame Obama for the economic crisis. Some more rightly but not right, try to blame the greedy CEOs on Wall Street. None of those are where the economic crisis really began.

It began when national news became a place where one news reporter started interviewing another news reporter about what's going on in the world. When the mainstream media shifted from peddling INFORMATION to KNOWLEDGE (albeit faulty knowledge) the whole country naturally made many wrong choices that lead us to this situation.

How bad is it? Well it's this bad. The Jon Stewart Show on Comedy Central is the only hard hitting news show left. Recently when Jon took on CNBC and MSNBC as being founts of "bad ideas." NBC had to use the time tested technique of ignoring Jon until he went away. They had to ignore him because if Cramer's illegal trading techniques hit mainstream, he could be looking at AIG Bonus style scorn with the average American.

I've been having a hopefully friendly back and forth with @aptuscollab on Twitter (I'm xackr there) about the concept of a "Knowlege Economy." My fundamental problem is knowledge is a soft term. In the article that started the tweetfest, one of the participants in developing a "knowledge economy" said "we're not even sure what that means." @aptuscollab explained it as "making money from your brains." My critique was it was a buzz word. We have an old term I like better "Information Economy." If we properly manage the information, we can glean the knowledge ourselves. The problem with knowlege is it includes inferences which may or may not be correct until tested.

It's the problem we face with the "news" media. They are no longer giving us information, they are giving us their "knowledge" of the situation. This knowledge is in part based on the facts and in part based on the agenda of the organization, which is funded by the people we probably most need to be protected from.

Now take the bad knowledge and misinform a whole country for a long time, and kaboom! It will eventually run into reality.

We should not be just standing outside AIG protesting, we should be outside NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, etc. raising holy hell for not telling us the facts and giving us bad knowledge instead of good information.

We need more fact-based news programs and not juicy rehashes of gruesome court cases.

It's the responsible thing to do.