Yes.
This is exactly and precisely how I’ve come to feel.
And remember, we’re not talking about the need to filter and sift through interpretations or prognostications by the MSM. We’re talking about their reporting of supposedly simple and straighforward facts.
Hardly.
Yes, you’re doing their jobs while they look down their noses at you for not being a “real” journalist.
Reporting or not reporting. They decide what gets oxygen.
A local radio anouncer claimed the MS in MSNBC stands for make up stuff.
I don’t know if they have deliberately become unreliable sources, but a good case can be made for that.
Well, I and I dare say millions of others have long been convinced that they are deliberately unreliable sources. The only time the MSM, the left’s propaganda organ does not lie, spin, obfuscate and withhold the truth is when the truth occasionally suits their agenda. The MSM has engaged in “a long train of abuses and usurpations” of the public trust. It’s actions are at the least seditious and at worst traitorous.
Many years back I was involved in a few events that were covered by the newspapers. Those were days when the bias of the media was not quite so obvious. I was amazed when I barely recognized the accounts of such events. At the time I chalked it up to poetic license or misundertanding what had been related to them. Now it appears they were just working on learning to “spin” the news. Over the years it has become their normal MO.
Since a Republic depends on well-informed citizens for its continuing existence, it’s well that the Internet has arrived to counterbalance the ink-stained and carefully coifed purveyors of all the news that’s fit to spin.
It was August [whatever?], 1974, in my younger and more naive days.
The evening Nixon announced he was to resign the following day, I drove myself down to the White House to be a witness to history.
In front of the White House was a group of miscellaneous folks like me, many of us I suppose there for a similar reason. Others were there to celebrate, and celebrate they did: sparklers, firecrackers, whooping, shouting, one young woman leading celebrants in a leftie song about whatever. Celebration and mirth abounded.
Late that evening, when I was safely home and watching the proceedings on tee vee, the 11PM anchor introduced the event with [as closely as I can recall now, over a third of a century later] . . .
“An eerie calm was upon the White House this evening, as President Nixon [bla bla bla, whatever the anchor said next].”
That was no effin’ “eerie calm” (two exact words, those, I remember them well). There was NO mention of the celebration, the noise, the firecrackers, none at all. It was as though they’d already written the story, maybe even recorded it early for broadcast later.
This “event” wasn’t even controversial, like some violent antiwar demonstration or something, fergawdsake! Did they have to make it up??
Since that day, I have never trusted anything any of these sunzabitches say. And now, in my dotage, I am more distrusting and curmudgeonly than ever . . . wonder why . . .
I wonder if part of the problem with the perceived low reliability of the press is the twenty four hour news cycle, where journalists need to have something going all the time. Instead of taking the time to check something out, reporters will blurt out the most recent rumor.
Less would be more, in the case of journalism.
J.J. formerly Jimmy J. Says:
May 6th, 2013 at 7:24 pm
Sometimes it’s spin and sometimes it’s simply abject ignorance on the part of the reporters. I especially notice that with scientific and technological subjects. They literally don’t know what they’re talking about.
I served on a grand jury several years ago. Every single case that we covered that made it into the newspapers had something wrong, just plain wrong, in the news story.
We would indict on charge A, but not on charge B. And, surprise! the newspapers would get the charges backwards – stating that we indicted on B, but not A.
For Pete’s sake! How hard can it be to get the charge from the prosecutor’s press conference right? The prosecutor does everything short of handing it to the newsmedia on a silver platter. And they still got things wrong in every single case that they reported on – every single case.
J.J….
Dittos.
I particularly see such in pubs like Scientific American.
It’s now reduced to Onion/ Mad Magazine status.
Even “How is it Made” videos — made with the obvious assistance of the experts — are larded with horrific errors in fact.
Right now the lead post at ZeroHedge details how the US went off the Gold Standard in 1974….
Hello….
And what of 1933 and 1971?
Paging Winston Smith…
blert:
At least the Onion and Mad Magazine are funny.
It’s sad to see how formerly respectable publications like Scientific American and National Geographic have gone off into the fever swamps of the environmentalist religion.
TET, we beat the manure out of the VC and the NVA. A true defeat for the little bastards . Somehow, the media decided we lost. Hmm
Easter Offensive 1972. Stomped them again .
Our media? Well, we lost …. again
Hmmm
See the pattern?
Giving somebody a bit of benefit of the doubt. The first reports from the battlefield are invariably wrong, say the military authorities. Okay. And the same is probably likely for anything exciting.
After that….
From time to time you can see a study where people are asked about reporting of something with which they are familiar; it being their job, avocation, or they were by luck in the middle of it.
How often did the papers get it wrong? Usually 80% or more, is the consensus.
Here’s something positive:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/05/congratulations-to-jean-yarbrough.php
Michael Crichton said it best.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward–reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Murray Gell-Mann is one of the few people to be the sole winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics. As some one once said, Murray has five brains and each one is smarter than yours.