That is what Big Journalism is in general - distraction. It systematically draws attention away from the significant and to the superficial and the negative. It does so because significant things - such as battlefield valor and businesses which prosper because they reveal and address opportunities for improvement - reveal how small big talk actually is.Big Journalism is The Distraction Establishment.
Imus isn’t the real bad guy
Kansas City Star ^ | April 11, 2007
His behaviour was criminal - or should be.
His behavior was transparently unethical. Actually, he slandered the entire Duke Lacrosse Team by publicly accusing them, falsely, of sonewalling ("a blue wall of silence").But we all know that the actual exploiters of the Duke Lacrosse Team were others who picked up on the gambit, and ran with it. The Duke 88, for example. But the real deep pockets exploiters were in the propaganda (so-called "objective") media. Just as in the case of the 60 Minutes "Killian Memos" October surprise hit on President Bush - and as in the case of the post-election commentary on Fox News Channel's calling the '00 election for Bush in the wee hours after the election, Big Journalism systematically promotes itself at the expense of others. Its claim of objectivity is a fraud, and that fraud makes all other frauds it perpetrates doubly - no, trebly as in "triple damages for RICO" - egregious.
The proper target of the legitimate lawsuit which should lie in all these cases is not just an individual like Nifong but broadcast journalism and the FCC for licensing broadcasters and allowing them to pull these stunts with impunity.