Posted on 10/02/2005 2:35:48 AM PDT by mal
" Would people support a group of people that merely gather and report facts, without dressing it up or spinning it?"
Problem is, one person's 'fact' is another person's spin. Even choosing which 'facts' to present in which order is a 'biased' decision. Best that can be hoped for is that they allow airtime to opposing viewpoints, point out any obvious inaccuracies in the accounts and allow the viewer to make up their own mind.
I just have to say that was a great post...I thought about the very same thing with the two States..I am sure lots of folks did..
Always a problem when dealing with 'facts' instead of facts.
I thought it was Bush's fault?
"Always a problem when dealing with 'facts' instead of facts."
But without the 'facts', a news broadcast would take about 5 minutes. Which would be a problem for 24 hour news stations ;)
Post 12 says it all. Very good! The news guys kept trying to stir up Texans, choosing only a person in Texas who was angry at the authorities as their one victim interview in a show. Meanwhile, every Texan I know got on with life - evacuating, then coming back and straightening things up without a word about how someone should help them!
There's a word that defines a group of people (reporters) who have such low expectations of a group of poor, black, citizens that they believe rumors and lies about them. It's called RACISM.
BUMP!
Steyn has the "Emperor's Not Wearing Any Clothes " Award for the Media (mainstream and otherwise).
For the longest time, news coverage has evolved from journalism to "Info-tainment".
Glittzy, spectacular, melodramatic razzel dazzel delivered in easily digestible ,repeatable sound bites,replete with crawl graphics containing sports scores, crime statistics, unrelated commentary, plastered with special graphics,promos for other programs and all delivered by sports production "on-the-scene-live" crews and delivered by "news personalities" each out doing the other with slick rain gear,cool baseball caps and situated in gale force gusts of wind ,rain,flying palm fronds and monstrous pounding waves.
All of this with jumpcuts back to studio for coverage by news tarts vacantly reading copy they have just seen about stuff they have no idea about and more concerned that they finish in time for the 70-millionth rerun of "Bob" and his "erection" spot TV commercials.
This is what we have grown to recognize as "NEWS".And it took two calamities with the unerring eye of Mark Steyn for us to realize that our "news mechanisms" are the even greater calamity.
In the event of a real disaster, where on earth do we turn?
More INFOTAINMENT?
I'm deeply disappointed that the MSM didn't pick up all the deaths caused by Zombies. And cannabalism explains why we have only found 1,000 of the 10,000 dead. Maybe some of the missing dead are members of the 1700 strong New Orleans police farce, er, force, that only had 1,000 actual members.
Good list. However, you might want to add that in LA the governor refuses to answer questions while many want to blame the former governor of Texas for her mistakes.
Yet another example of why no one compares to Steyn.
the "rumors" the posters here were commenting on were almost entirely items reported on TV news as fact! The value of the commentary here on FR, however, is that enough intelligent and informed posters are available to sort through the garbage presented as news. Katrina is an example of an too much garbage and too few alternative sources (due to the evac and phone lines being down) for the filter here to work as well and as fast.
Classic Steyn.
"the "rumors" the posters here were commenting on were almost entirely items reported on TV news as fact!"
Not really. If you do a Google News search on articles from the time period on the Superdome 'rapes and murders' for instance, the story is always presented as what it is: something that has been reported, but that the reporter had not personally seen. The only time anyone claims as it as a fact is in quotes from authorities (I see Ray Nagin and Eddie Compass for example). In these cases, the media has (accurately) reported the statements that they made. Again, in the case of the '10000 dead' - this eminated from a statement by Senator David Vitter, the quote being “My guess is that it will start at 10,000, but that is only a guess,”. Again, all the reports I see quote that as stated, nowhere can I see it being claimed as a fact.
I don't really see what you think the alternative is, whether the media should just not report the words of officials until such time as they can personally verify. But then, everyone would complain that they weren't being given any information.
"How many times does this have to happen before the press seriously examines why so many of them get the big stories wrong in exactly the same way?"
Yet we can click back in the archive of the Sun-Times and find an article by Steyn dated September 4th:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn04.html
"Anyone watching TV in recent days will have seen plenty of "re-primitivized man," not in Liberia or Somalia, but in Louisiana. Cops smashing the Wal-Mart DVD cabinet so they can get their share of the booty along with the rest of the looters, gangs firing on a children's hospital and on rescue helicopters, hurricane victims being raped in the New Orleans Convention Center. . . "
"Not exactly the most impressive law enforcement agency even on a good day, the New Orleans Police Department sent along some 80 officers to rescue the rape victims trapped in the Convention Center, but were beaten back by the mob"
I usually find Steyn's stuff interesting and thought provoking, but this article is laughable hypocracy, at best.
Brilliant!
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