Part of my government training was to be a PIO (Public Information Officer)
It was interesting to sit in on press conference of facts that I knew very well. The press briefing kit had been well crafted. The briefing was precise and informative. Yet, at the briefing, "reports" (arbiters of the truth) would ask leading questions as if there was some hidden fact the government was withholding.
When the news articles were published, often we could not recognize what was reported with what they had been told.
I have since learned not to believe what is printed in a newspaper because it was often written by someone who could not take a set of facts and properly digest them. The PIOs were often on the telephone, after the fact with the reporters using the opportunity to correct their stories, and sometimes to add something that none of the other papers had yet understood. It would have been easier if the paper would have just quoted from our press briefing. Yet they want to put the facts through their magic filter as if the masses can only understand it better that way.
Instead newspapers have become havens for unhappy liberals who want to use their forum to reeducate the masses.
Isn’t “unhappy liberals” a massive redundancy?
Most of my over 20 years in the Army was on ships and boats. Often we would work on a project and reporters would check us out. We always made clear we were regular army Transportation Corps.
Invariably the story would come out calling us “Corp of Engineers”!