Hot Air on TV

Here’s a quite elegant parody of one of the queens of televised hot air.

Most of the time when I’m in my apartment I keep the television on in the background, since I like to keep up with the news. I keep it tuned in to whatever cable news program is not at the moment showing Nancy Grace, Larry King, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, or any of the various other opinionated, annoying, ill informed, illogical, and sentimental gas bags who have multiplied in recent years. This evening one of them (I have deliberately forgotten which one, even as I was reaching for the channel changer) was “reporting” about a baby that was kidnapped by “human traffickers,” perhaps because the parents had not paid the fees they charge for smuggling them into the U.S. The entire discussion was about the horrors of human trafficking, with not a single mention of the fact that those horrors are created 100% by the laws restricting freedom of movement, all of which the TV host and the guest “expert” were eager to “toughen” and to “enforce more effectively.” The host and the hopped-up police officer who being interviewed even mentioned that the traffickers prey on the fear of illegal immigrants to go to the police, without realizing that that problem is caused by the very laws they are seeking to strengthen. In the meantime, they implied that human trafficking of voluntary immigrants was indistinguishable from the slave trade, from the rape of children, etc., etc. They gave no sign that they had 1) any news to report or 2) a single coherent or rational thought about cause-and-effect, incentives, or the roots of the problems about which they were so windily yammering.

I guess it’s back to radio for me. (I’ll just miss the occasional pictures when I hear something interesting and crane my neck over to see the picture. But then, I suppose that’s what the internet’s for. Hear the story on the radio, go to the web for more.