 |
| Harry S. Truman holding the Chicago Daily Tribune with the erroneous headline, "Dewey Defeats Truman" at Union Station in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 4, 1948, after winning the 1948 United States presidential election. He was so widely expected to lose that the Tribune printed the erroneous headline, boldly anticipating victory for his opponent, Thomas E. Dewey. (Source) |
I sat for a moment then answered, "No, not particularly. I seldom watch the news."
She seemed taken aback by that, she comes from a generation which trusted the national media and perhaps still does. I do not, I stopped trusting them around the time Cronkite came on television with this ...
Negotiate? As a rather hot-headed 15 year old (whose future seemed to increasingly involve going to Vietnam) I felt this way about negotiation ...
But I have matured since then, negotiations over a business deal, or a political compromise? Sure. But when your young men, and now young women, are dying in someone else's fight? Yeah, I have a problem with that.
But the news, no, I don't watch it. I do know what's going on in the world via the internet, social media, the occasional glance at a news article, or conversations with those who devour the news.
My problem with the news is that they don't just report on what happened, they try to venture a guess as to the why it happened.
They also tend to lean towards the more gruesome aspects of the news. The old "if it bleeds, it leads" theory of news reporting.
And now the media (and the population in general) seems to have the attention span of a giraffe.¹ Get people riled up about one thing, then move on to something else.
The war in Ukraine was constant front page news, now it isn't. Why? Well, it's a real war. It's grinding, there are no flashy offensives, it's pretty much trench warfare for the most part. People don't find that interesting.
The war in Gaza provides another example, what's going on with that?
The Houthis flinging drones and missiles at shipping. Iran killing American soldiers in the Middle East (and we're there because why?)
So do I watch the news?
No.
I have no desire to go insane, just yet,
YMMV
¹ Roughly 15 seconds from what I understand. The giraffe experts can correct me.
Cronkite was an asset. Or,at least that is Out There. Search Cronkite Mockingbird. The game has been being played for a long time, it seems. Watching Bush apparently not making sense, rambling about Reality, only saw it once,, so I might not get it exact, but he said
ReplyDeleteWe create reality. While you're trying to understand your reality we're creating the next one.
Or something like that. The things I only see one time I pay attention to.
In 73,in the Air Force in Biloxi I saw a reporter catch up to Billy Carter. He called out, Billy stopped and turned. Reporter asked a question and Billy started answering it. No word salad, straight up answering it,until he saw the camera,, instant dumbass. That was the six o'clock news. I expected to see it on the ten o'clock news, because Who is This? Isn't this guy supposed to be an idiot? And now, proof that he isn't..
But no. I was switching between the three stations, hunting for it. Nope..
Interesting.
DeleteInteresting fact about giraffes and that attention span is longer than most people have nowadays......... :)
ReplyDeleteSad, innit?
DeleteWhen I saw untruths being reported as real on all the "news" outlets (all of them!), I stopped watching. Most all of the media is a corporate owned mouthpiece for whatever it is they are driving us toward, so I don't watch.
ReplyDeleteOn election night when the the President was have a news conference about the election vote counting none of the licensed broadcast (over the air) networks would show it, even Fox News said he was a "sore loser" and would not broadcast his remarks.
They OWN the airways and make the propaganda sound true because they own it all, the only way to avoid it is not to listen...
If this blog gets too out of line and/or too popular it was have troubles too.. Google is part of "them".
Yes, Gargle is part of "them."
DeleteRe: Giraffe/attention span..
ReplyDeleteI couldn't find but this one
https://animalblogz.com/what-animal-has-the-shortest-attention-span/#comment-1297
The article says the hamster has the shortest attention span of any animal.
Then says that exact same thing about giraffes.
Bees? Just tells about them some, nothing about attention span.
The author may have been looking at attention spans for personal reasons.
And apparently has never been chased by bees. They don't forget WTF they're Doing That quickly.
The article says, about giraffes,
They are constantly moving and changing direction, and they never seem to stay in one place for very long
A sentence like that would lose points in seventh grade English.
Bees can be pretty focused when they need to be.
DeleteWhen your place on the food chain is "Lunch" you don't stop moving or changing direction, especially if you can only get one or two mouthfuls of foliage from one tree. Head-down grazers in huge herds can afford to move slowly, giraffes cannot. If you see one in a wildlife part they can be quite focused, following a truck full of humans with food to hand out for a lot longer than a minute.
DeleteAs expected, the author of the giraffe article is an an idiot if he even exists. The text of the article looks like it was written by a bot.
Good point.
DeleteThe worst thing about the news media is not the semi-literate "reporting" of the news, it is the constant creation "news" made up out of whole cloth to fit an agenda. This is not a new thing, William Randolph Hearst bragged how his newspapers had gotten into our war with Spain over the Maine incident.
ReplyDeleteYeah, not a real great guy. Yes, a lot of the news is either made up or embellished in such a way so to fit an agenda. It stinks.
Delete
ReplyDelete"My problem with the news is that they don't just report on what happened, they try to venture a guess as to the why it happened"
News?I haven't owned a television for several years and didn't watch the talking heads when I did have one. They are like the 'scientists' whose conclusions match what those funding them hope they find.
My father, a CBI vet, was outraged we were in Vietnam. He strongly believed we had no business being involved in any Asian war. He was correct.
They lied to us to get us in it. JFK was bringing troops home. LBJ turned them around. His wife, whose name I can't make myself type, owned some of the troop ships. They were Making Money hauling our men to be killed.
DeleteI caught the news a few days in a row. The report was
We took a hill. It cost a lot of American lives. Then, after taking the high ground, we weren't Driven off of it, we simply withdrew. Then we took it again, lives lost,
Withdrew Again,,
I don't remember if we went back. Or maybe the order came down but the Lieutenant got fragged .
So many in need of hanging.
Eisenhower sent the first troops in but I've never found why he sent them. Peacekeeping? But Why?
Deletehttps://www.history.com/news/us-presidents-vietnam-war-escalation#Dwight%20D.%20Eisenhower
DeleteIt's not long.
Blame the French, they wanted to reestablish their colonial rule over Indochina. Truman let them. He should have listened to those who really did know better.
DeleteIke should have pushed for elections, let Ho win if he could. Ngo Dinh Diem was corrupt.
DeleteI started listening to books in the car on the short trips in lieu of NPR. I just could not stand every single solitary person to the right of Castro being described as Far Right Wing, Extreme Right Wing or Nazi. Their total lack of awareness at sharing their never ending hatred and disgust of half of Americans without ever appearing to notice anything exceptional about it is jarring. On top of that, j-school graduates are right down there with meth users when it comes to general intelligence so why would anyone listen to a thing they have to say.
ReplyDeleteWait! Was that a giraffe?
Spot on, Cap'n.
DeleteJ School students do tend to come from the bottom quintile of college students.
DeleteFigures.
DeleteAh, the news. The urge to create something in order to sell copies or air time has been around since the dawn of paid journalism.
ReplyDeleteSadly, right now, I trust Alex Jones far more than the main stream media, especially since AJ's 'Pizza Gate' (pedophiles using pizza code to order up, well, disgusting) has turned out to be true and the MSM reporting that purported it to be false has been proven to be untrue.
Can't make this up.
Like the 2000 election, which the eneMedia tried to steal by reporting Florida before all of the state had a chance to vote and then pushing the whole 'Gore Won' in Broward County even though repeated recounts just extended Bush's lead. But then again, election chicanery has been a part of American politics for a long time (like, how they don't tell you that Lincoln won even though he wasn't on the ballots of several states... hmmm... preview of coming attractions?)
I have seen the way the eneMedia does interviews and picks and chooses and modifies and outright lies. There are movies about it, for God's sake! Only recently (in American Years) have people taken to filming their own interviews so as to have a fact-check on the posted/published interviews and even then that won't get people to change their minds easily (like the Nickolas Sandman vs fake Native American kerfluffle, video evidence showed Nick was correct, polite and right and the eneMedia had that info and ignored it, much to their financial chagrin, or the George Floyd 'not murder' by the hands of police (hint- nothing to do with the double fistfull of drugs GF swallowed...) or the recent case against President Trump for slandering EJ Carroll where Trump's team wasn't allowed to bring in any evidence or to question the micro-evidence of the prosecution - no court tampering there....
Yeah, news. The Not-Babylon Bee does a better job of reporting news. The Babylon Bee does a better job. Alex Jones and Glen Beck do a better job. Random idiot on the internet does a better job of reporting the facts.
Bah!
In a nutshell ...
DeleteYup.
I've had personal dealings with the local media. Beside the lack of context, incomplete reporting, and in all situations not releasing the interview, I found the only goal was sensationalism, and only reporting the narrative. Since most national news agencies are filled with those that started with local affiliates, I can only surmise my experience is an accurate representation of what is called news.
ReplyDeleteSounds about right.
DeleteIt's sad that we get better news about what's happening here in the United States from England's 'The Daily Mail.'
ReplyDeleteBut then again, the English and Europe get better news about what's happening in their backyard from our lame arsed media sources.
Weird, isn't it?
I know.
DeleteSarge (and others here) are in good company.
ReplyDeleteStarting with TJ (that slave owning guy who supported insurrections) who wrote in 1807:
"I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
That seems to be the source of the all too accurate statement misattributed to Mark Twain, but believed to have been created by lazy news people from whole cloth, or perhaps inspired by the Jefferson quote:
"If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."
But, Mark Twain DID write this:
"“So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldn't find honest employment.”
And, Will Rogers nailed it when he wrote:
"All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance."
However, there is a difference between the news business and actual books, about which Mark Twain wrote:
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."
John Blackshoe
Hear, hear!
DeleteSome years ago, the local ND paper had a story about a civilian helo pilot that had a crash landing. He refused to talk to the reporter sent to cover the story and was quoted for the reason (roughly) "You newspaper guys always get everything (politely) fouled up anyway". A few days later, a retraction was printed (buried deep in between the want ads and the legal notices) that the name and address of the pilot they had printed was wrong.
DeleteRetractions get buried. So does the truth.
DeleteAh... the myth of "the unbiased news." I think the closest we came to that was late '50s and early '60s. Usually at best a town or city would have one major daily on the left and one major daily on the right. Subscribe to both and split the difference.
ReplyDeleteNow, with 99&44/100 of The Press owned by what seems like 2 interlocking corporations, both left of center, and every "reporter" hoping to be the next Woodward and bring down a president (but only a conservative president) the bias is more obvious
Sad, but true.
DeleteLove the term "EneMedia" above. Perfect!
ReplyDeleteWhile teh intarwebz is under the thumb of gulag et al; they haven't really tried to "stop the signal" entirely -yet- which gives us an opportunity to find our own "news". I subscribe to a number of feeds that I trust.
Boat Guy
I do the same. If those voices start getting silenced, then we really need to worry.
DeletePay no attention. Worked in radio in the '60's and 70's, so@e of the tasks were news. I saw the transition from reporters asking questions and following up (theirs and others) ... to the herd lining up for the Xeroxed handouts. There's no news in the news, only echos of what you're supposed to hear.
ReplyDeleteSickening; &I wish it wasn't so. Taylor is stunning in that white gown and black gloves, isn't she?
Taylor?
DeleteTaylor Swift. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/grammys-2024-list-of-winners-004520877.html
DeleteAh, that Taylor. It's all part of the Hollyweird stuff that I go out of my way to ignore. And as the Foo Fighters were stiffed, I have even less regard for the Grammys.
DeleteMy limited experience with giraffes leads me to believe that they are all about eating, and if you are feeding them, you will have their full attention.
ReplyDeleteI recall watching a documentary some ways back about a ranch (probably in California) that had giraffes. Seems the giraffes were mighty fond of a certain treat (I want to say carrot but that detail escapes me) and they would come running when the folks running the ranch let them know that treats were forthcoming.
DeleteThing is, one giraffe at a time would get the treat while the other (others?) had to wait their turn. I recall the rancher remarking that he had a long stick with a red flag on the end of it that he'd have someone wave for the other giraffes, just to keep them focused.
They knew about treats, but if they didn't get one immediately, they'd wander off, unless they had something else to focus on.