shot from the grassy knoll, with a rifle made using alien technology from Roswell, by a Jewish media elite gunman during 911....
Ah conspiracy theories.....
We all have our pet ones. We all have ones we think are "obvious" and we all have ones we think are a stinking load.
I'm no different.
I believe that the US government is hiding knowledge of extraterrestrial visitation.
I believe there was more to the JFK murder than one lone gunman acting on his own.
I do NOT believe there was a faked moon landing.
I do NOT believe there was anything other than al queda behind 9/11
I do NOT believe in a time tunnel in Maine that can be used to create psychic creatures.
I do NOT believe Hitler's clone is living in Argentina.
Then there are the things I know.
I KNOW there is no media conspiracy aimed at deluding the public, keeping people stupid, hiding "the truth" from you, controlling what you watch or what morals you develop or who you vote for.
What I believe and don't believe are irrelevant. The only thing we can ever speak to is what we know.
The simple truth is that if there is a media conspiracy to control the world or even just to turn honest news into advertising pieces at the cost of journalistic integrity I'd know about it.
I've worked at multiple news outlets across the country. I've written well over 4,000-5,000 stories at the very minimum. I've been a reporter and editor, freelance, bi-weekly, weekly, daily and quarterly.
I've covered everything from personal injury accidents in St. Clair County, Michigan farmland to Senate hearings on the energy bill.
There is no "the media". Period.
There is no cabal of media megacorps trying to own everything that hits the airwaves or print. Period.
News outlets, be they television, newspaper or internet, are a decentralized, non-organized mess of individuals who all are doing their own thing.
There are a few large companies, but they still don't account for most media outlets.
What's more, even with the recent sale of Knight-Ridder, notice how they sold off all their main papers to individual companies? Kind of hard to do if there's a supersecret plan to rule all papers and news stations.
Tomorrow, you could start a news website, hire five guys, get together some contacts, some phones and the like and you could start a news site.
And yes, it could become very popular and compete with major outlets.
I know this because the reporter who trained me at The Detroit News, John Bebow, did so with Michigan Live.
No shadowy guys in suits showed up at his doorstep and told him to toe the line. He wasn't bought out by crazed zionists bent on world domination, and he isn't sitting behind his desk scheming on how to screw the reader to bring in more advertisers.
Now, a large number of papers pay John to have their papers presented on the web.
I've covered highly sensitive stories. I've even covered stories that directly negatively affected my own paper's advertisers. Not once, not one single time, even when I ran a highly negative story on Wal-Mart, which shoveled out insane advertising dollars to the paper I was working at, did I ever have a story edited.
Not one time was I ever called into an editor's office and told "look, you have to slant this story this way" or "hey, we're going to change this story so that it looks more like A, B, or C" in any way that could be perceived as intentional slanting.
Were they all avoiding me? Am I the luckiest reporter on planet earth?
Or could it be that people just don't know how to read the paper or watch the news? Or that people, whenever they hear news they don't like, tend to think it can't be true, therefore the teller must be lying.
Why do you think it is that we have had, for centuries, phrases warning us against taking things out on the bearer of bad (or unwanted) news?
It's because people would rather believe that the bearer is wrong instead of the news being true.
People cannot handle the truth when the truth conflicts with what they want to hear.
Also, people cannot accept that they themselves might be the one who actually is perceiving things incorrectly.
True story, during a survey of how to better report the news at one paper I worked at, we did a test. We took a group of people who were self-proclaimed to have "right-leaning" political views and gave them a story and told them to find how it was slanted to the left. They came up with a nice long list. We did the same with a group of people who had "left-leaning" views. They too came up with a long list.
Problem was the two groups were given the same story. When they were put together in a room and shown the other side's lists even they, after some resistance, started to laugh and admit they saw how they themselves had slanted things.
I myself repeated this experiment on a message board and got the same result.
People read the news and watch the news through glasses colored with the tint of their own perspective.
However, people don't want to hear that they do that. They cannot accept it.
Case in point, there are people reading this who have, through the majority of it, never considered that any of the statements hearin might actually be true, but instead are more concerned with a retort to the premise.
They cannot accept that they might be perceiving things differently, or have certain biases. It is far easier for their minds to accept that there's a multinational conspiracy that has stretched for hundreds of years through a decentralized, unconnected industry made up of hundreds of thousands of people from every walk of life which ranges from the local city paper alternative rag, to major newspapers to cable news channels, owned by over 1,000 different unnconnected ownerships whose goal is to sacrifice the truth for the sake of advertising dollars or their own personal agenda which just happened to be signed off on by every reporter, desk editor, managing editor, copy desk editor and publisher (all the people who have to sign off on your average news story), very rarely whom are the same people for every story in an industry that actually BANS advertisers or Opinion Page editors from interacting with reporters.
Except, of course, unless they know you personally....then "oh, well not YOU, you're different."
I used to hear that before...except that phrase usually followed a lament about "those black people".
It's just as silly applying it to people in the news industry.
We all have our pet ones. We all have ones we think are "obvious" and we all have ones we think are a stinking load.
I'm no different.
I believe that the US government is hiding knowledge of extraterrestrial visitation.
I believe there was more to the JFK murder than one lone gunman acting on his own.
I do NOT believe there was a faked moon landing.
I do NOT believe there was anything other than al queda behind 9/11
I do NOT believe in a time tunnel in Maine that can be used to create psychic creatures.
I do NOT believe Hitler's clone is living in Argentina.
Then there are the things I know.
I KNOW there is no media conspiracy aimed at deluding the public, keeping people stupid, hiding "the truth" from you, controlling what you watch or what morals you develop or who you vote for.
What I believe and don't believe are irrelevant. The only thing we can ever speak to is what we know.
The simple truth is that if there is a media conspiracy to control the world or even just to turn honest news into advertising pieces at the cost of journalistic integrity I'd know about it.
I've worked at multiple news outlets across the country. I've written well over 4,000-5,000 stories at the very minimum. I've been a reporter and editor, freelance, bi-weekly, weekly, daily and quarterly.
I've covered everything from personal injury accidents in St. Clair County, Michigan farmland to Senate hearings on the energy bill.
There is no "the media". Period.
There is no cabal of media megacorps trying to own everything that hits the airwaves or print. Period.
News outlets, be they television, newspaper or internet, are a decentralized, non-organized mess of individuals who all are doing their own thing.
There are a few large companies, but they still don't account for most media outlets.
What's more, even with the recent sale of Knight-Ridder, notice how they sold off all their main papers to individual companies? Kind of hard to do if there's a supersecret plan to rule all papers and news stations.
Tomorrow, you could start a news website, hire five guys, get together some contacts, some phones and the like and you could start a news site.
And yes, it could become very popular and compete with major outlets.
I know this because the reporter who trained me at The Detroit News, John Bebow, did so with Michigan Live.
No shadowy guys in suits showed up at his doorstep and told him to toe the line. He wasn't bought out by crazed zionists bent on world domination, and he isn't sitting behind his desk scheming on how to screw the reader to bring in more advertisers.
Now, a large number of papers pay John to have their papers presented on the web.
I've covered highly sensitive stories. I've even covered stories that directly negatively affected my own paper's advertisers. Not once, not one single time, even when I ran a highly negative story on Wal-Mart, which shoveled out insane advertising dollars to the paper I was working at, did I ever have a story edited.
Not one time was I ever called into an editor's office and told "look, you have to slant this story this way" or "hey, we're going to change this story so that it looks more like A, B, or C" in any way that could be perceived as intentional slanting.
Were they all avoiding me? Am I the luckiest reporter on planet earth?
Or could it be that people just don't know how to read the paper or watch the news? Or that people, whenever they hear news they don't like, tend to think it can't be true, therefore the teller must be lying.
Why do you think it is that we have had, for centuries, phrases warning us against taking things out on the bearer of bad (or unwanted) news?
It's because people would rather believe that the bearer is wrong instead of the news being true.
People cannot handle the truth when the truth conflicts with what they want to hear.
Also, people cannot accept that they themselves might be the one who actually is perceiving things incorrectly.
True story, during a survey of how to better report the news at one paper I worked at, we did a test. We took a group of people who were self-proclaimed to have "right-leaning" political views and gave them a story and told them to find how it was slanted to the left. They came up with a nice long list. We did the same with a group of people who had "left-leaning" views. They too came up with a long list.
Problem was the two groups were given the same story. When they were put together in a room and shown the other side's lists even they, after some resistance, started to laugh and admit they saw how they themselves had slanted things.
I myself repeated this experiment on a message board and got the same result.
People read the news and watch the news through glasses colored with the tint of their own perspective.
However, people don't want to hear that they do that. They cannot accept it.
Case in point, there are people reading this who have, through the majority of it, never considered that any of the statements hearin might actually be true, but instead are more concerned with a retort to the premise.
They cannot accept that they might be perceiving things differently, or have certain biases. It is far easier for their minds to accept that there's a multinational conspiracy that has stretched for hundreds of years through a decentralized, unconnected industry made up of hundreds of thousands of people from every walk of life which ranges from the local city paper alternative rag, to major newspapers to cable news channels, owned by over 1,000 different unnconnected ownerships whose goal is to sacrifice the truth for the sake of advertising dollars or their own personal agenda which just happened to be signed off on by every reporter, desk editor, managing editor, copy desk editor and publisher (all the people who have to sign off on your average news story), very rarely whom are the same people for every story in an industry that actually BANS advertisers or Opinion Page editors from interacting with reporters.
Except, of course, unless they know you personally....then "oh, well not YOU, you're different."
I used to hear that before...except that phrase usually followed a lament about "those black people".
It's just as silly applying it to people in the news industry.
posted by Dark Lord at 7:17 PM
7 Comments:
Well, of course YOU will say this. YOU are part of the conspiracy and must tow the line or MiBs will show up and drag you to Roswell where you will be reprogrammed with alien DNA. Hang on while I answer the door...
So...you don't think that the main job of the Head Editor is to make sure that the publication is presenting the slant/views of the parent company in order to satisfy the demands of those who are supplying the money...more aptly, making the spice flows...
There is no Media Conspiracy, I will obey...
So...you don't think that the main job of the Head Editor is to make sure that the publication is presenting the slant/views of the parent company in order to satisfy the demands of those who are supplying the money...more aptly, making the spice flows..."
Think? No.
Know? Yes. I know that's not their job.
I know because because I've been there. I've had the owner of one place I worked for be told that if we didn't retract a story I wrote they'd pull the story. I asked my editor and the editor in chief came out, stood up and made a newsroom wide announcement that no paper worth its salt will ever change its content for the sake of an advertiser. Ever.
I've heard editors curse out advertising execs for even making the suggestion more than once. That is, simply, not how it's done.
More than once I've seen papers lose advertisers instead of cave in to pressure, yet in 14 years of reporting I have never, not one single lonely time ever seen the opposite happen. Not once.
Every paper I've worked at has had some instance and every paper has rules and bylaws and a mission statement. One of the top ones is that news editorial content will NOT be affected by advertisers.
To the point where I've even written a negative story about the paper's parent company during a run-up to a major newspaper strike. This was the conversation.
The editor was against the strike and corporate management. I was a newspaper guild worker. This is how it went down.
Editor: "Well, this story isn't going to make ____ look good. They are not going to like this at corporate."
Me: "So, what do we do?"
Editor: "DO? We run it. It's news. The end."
But it's easier for people to believe otherwise than face reality because it might force them to actually reconsider preconceived notions.
I, personally, think that they are making him say that.
~r
Rae, you're stealing from me again.
DL...I respect that you and most other reporters and journalist believe that the truth is more important...
I just know that money talks more than an article about the truth...
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