Disinformation in the media

The reporting of “reports” such as the one about cannibalism in New Orleans may have been based on outrageous remarks by local officals and therefore legitimate to that extent. What bothers me though, is that anyone who would believe that well fed people would be so hungry, that only 3 days after running out of groceries, they would resort to eating a corpse, is an idiot. (arn’t all Americans overweight anyway?)

Sauron

Arthur, note the word Once!

Very rarely do you ever read an article you know anything about fist hand however I wonce read an article on UFO’s , it was cobblers all about how a woman on a train had seen a “triangle” hovering over the airfield at Warton form a train ,the article was accompanied by pictures of Warton taken from the South side of the river, why to make it look secretive, theres a public footpath runs along the North side of the river right by the airfield!! The second point about the womans story is that there is no train line that runs past Warton or anywhere near for that matter, I contacted the UFO magazine that the article was in and they told me “they had reported the facts and my complaints would NOT be aired on the letters page”.
Now think of all the news reported that you don’t know anything about it must be absolute tosh.

So you get your news from UFO magazines? ‘Nuff said :rolleyes:

Very rarely do you ever read an article you know anything about fist hand however I once read an article on UFO’s , it was cobblers all about how a woman on a train had seen a “triangle” hovering over the airfield at Warton form a train ,the article was accompanied by pictures of Warton taken from the South side of the river, why to make it look secretive, theres a public footpath runs along the North side of the river right by the airfield!! The second point about the womans story is that there is no train line that runs past Warton or anywhere near for that matter, I contacted the UFO magazine that the article was in and they told me “they had reported the facts and my complaints would NOT be aired on the letters page”.
Now think of all the news reported that you don’t know anything about it must be absolute tosh.

The media would be considered a lot more reliable if people could actually read.

How often hasn’t someone’s opionion based on an article posted on these forums been shredded to pieces simply because that person overlooked words like “may be”, “reportedly”, “allegedly”, “has been said to”, “is considered,” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera? Let alone subjective reading: selecting your news outlets only to support your own prejudices/preferences rather than truely shopping around in order to use your own grey mass. In my totally unhumble opinion, there are a lot of people who can be considered practically illiterate for exactly that reason, and the proof can be found on these boards each and every day.

That being said, a lot is wrong with the way news is delivered these days, and a lot of blame for that can be put with ‘the media’ (a phrase which i don’t like seeing used without some proper description: does it include yellow-page newspapers? Television only? Anything but Fox? B!tching about ‘the media’ without a proper definition of the word IMHO won’t get above your average beergut-BBQ-bullsh!t). I don’t know the book Sean mentioned, nor the author, but i do think that my background does allow me a bit of commenting.

The main problem is that with the current speed of reporting in the last 20 years, it has become almost impossible to get any perspective whatsoever which is necessary to properly asses a news report. Even more so, the demanded speed gives little, if any, time to actually do some factchecking and/or researching concerning an event. For example, if someone during a live TV-interview states that he/she heard cannibalism occurred during the New Orleans anarchy, you will have that piece of misinformation out in the open. Result? A vague, unsubstantiated rumour which is ‘reported’ on television – CNN has said so itself. The actual context of the quote is generally lost on the news consumer, and another stain on the image of ‘the media’.

The example above is, how sensationalist it may be, still pretty innocent. The speed of news reporting and the mentioned lack of context-offering it implies can obviously be used to the benefit of any organisation/person who wants to use ‘the media’ for his own purpose. Spindoctors like Jamie Shea (NATO during Allied Force in 1999) are experts at it, for example. The way the ‘breaking news’ was brought that French-made missiles with 2003-dates were found in Iraq was another. The smoke is reported, the fire is assumed.

And then there is of course the fact that putting context to a report is considered an editorial job these days, rather than a reporting job. While this has been done for ages, it does make it almost impossible to put a report in a politically neutral context. People who complain about this being something new are historically oblivious though, perhaps the only reason why it might be more obvious nowadays is because different media are generally more accessible and because the society they live in are (considered to be) more polarised.

The most obvious examples are … false Koran toilet flushing reports ….

Never disproven, but the only source about toilet flushing was an anonymous one. A story like this with such a marginal basis should obviously never have been published, but that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue.

…stores of cannibalism, raping, and murder in New Orleans,

Correct, although it would be hard to blame this on a left-leaning media. If you take these reports to judge in particular the American media on, you’d think that each and every news outlet is ran by the KKK. Anyway, here in Europe, i didn’t hear anything solid about such atrocities. Each and every report only reported the rumours about those incidents, not those incidents themselves.

Cheers

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=S51pmvQClW&isbn=0895260069&itm=1

SOC, it’s called Chinese Whispers,

Anyway on topic: Most journalists realise what they write is complete nonsense. If a journalist were to care about telling the truth, nothing more nothing less, then I’m gonna guess it wouldn’t be long until they are looking for another job.

It’s about selling papers, slightist wiff of gossip and a reporter is there, they publish it, it sells papers and big “What If?” Conspiracy titles again bring in readers, you are drawn in to read it. You find this to be more common with tabloids however some of the broadsheets are succeptable to printing idle gossip,

Also can someone remind me which is which, Republicans and Democrats, ones for providing benefits and the others for letting people live their own lives, been drummed into my head several times in History but keep forgetting.

SOC whats the ISBN of that book, sounds like it would be helpful for my Media studies work in GCSE english that I have got coming up. Cheers

The U.S. mainstream media have been caught in some very uncomefortable situations in the last year or so. The common denominator appears to be that news organizations do not investigate stories properly. The most obvious examples are the fake Bush National Guard memos, false Koran toilet flushing reports, the CNN resignations over comments about the targeting of journalists in Iraq, stores of cannibalism, raping, and murder in New Orleans, misrepresentations of the U.S. congressional report on 9/11, etc.

As to conspiracy theories, one would normally expect that those who promote and believe the most unlikely offerings are simply moonbats and fruitcakes but some of the most bazarre claims are given extensive coverage by the media which only serves to promote the most idiotic notions. Look at the extensive coverage the ravings of 9/11 conspiracies theorists continue to get.

A short time ago some nut on this forum was raving about the U.S. government being manipulated by Jews!

Sauron

No I’m sure, I looked and double checked just for you 😀

Hell, Clinton is only mentioned on 5 pages, and not a single reference is in the least bit negative.

Are you sure about that, or is it just media disinformation? :diablo:

as far as Media goes, I think this following link explains my feelings pretty accurately.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/ObjectiveNews.shtml

Nah, it’s not suprising at all. But how some of this stuff gets twisted out of context is pretty amusing. Reminds me of that telephone game played in schools when we were like 5, where you have to pass a message to the next person in line and so on and see how different it gets at the end.

Yeah, Miniter is definitely a conservative author, but this book is suprisingly free of political ranting. Hell, Clinton is only mentioned on 5 pages, and not a single reference is in the least bit negative.

If I’m thinking of the right Richard Miniter he’s a conservative author, who has a definite pro-Republic and anti-Democrat agenda and blames Bill Clinton for the rise of “Al Qaeda”.

He’s hardly an objective or unbiased pundit on these matters, so we should bear that in mind when assessing what he has to say – just as we should bear in mind the difference between opinion and fact.