We Just Can't Win

I remember when the Iraq war was still dominating news coverage. The wire services addressed the declining death rate by noting that grave diggers were having a hard time making ends meet. Boy, the media sure knows how to be objective.

Today the Fargo Forum ran an AP story: Landfills Hurting As Consumers Repair, Reuse. Read the story, but don't be surprised that it reads just as the title indicates. Landfills nationwide are facing a crisis, laying off workers, because we aren't dumping enough trash into landfills.

With the Iraqi grave digger story above, the media in general were trying to preserve their preferred narrative, namely that the Iraq war was "bad" (or "wrong", or "illegal"). Agree with that stance or not, taking a report that violence is down and looking for a way to frame that in a negative light is repulsive to me. It tells me that our supposedly objective media is going beyond reporting the news and is in the business of telling us how we should feel about it.

The landfill story is no different. Right now, the preferred narrative is that the economy is in the toilet. Any economic news must be subverted to advancing that narrative. For decades we've been told we waste too much, we generate too much trash, we don't recycle. But now it appears that was the story only as long as it was convenient. Now recycling is "bad". We should apparently be throwing things away rather than repairing them because we're hurting the economy otherwise.

Some may argue that I'm reading too much into it, that the article doesn't say we recycle too much or don't throw enough stuff away. But ask yourself this: before this recession started, when's the last time you read an article fretting about landfills not being full enough?