Gullible Journalists
Tyler Durden
camera_lumina at hotmail.com
Mon Feb 3 06:31:35 PST 2003
John Kelsey wrote...
"For some reason I've never been able to fathom, many journalists seem to be
remarkably gullable, when they're told something from the right kind of
source, especially a government agency or other official source."
Chomsky (dig around on http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm) and others have
commented on this quite a bit. What it seems to boil down to is a sort of
natural selection. Basically, it works like this:
1) Government is releasing some cool smart-bomb commercials, erh I mean
video to a few select news sources.
2) NBC sends a questioning, smart, well-informed dude to said press
conference.
3) During said smart-bomb footage notices the Arabic word for Hospital on
the top of the smart-bombs target, and asks "Is that a hospital?"
4) Government takes NBC off list of cool "insider" info: "Can't be trusted,
not playing ball"
5) NBC, now out in the cold, assigns said informed journalist to covering
Ruwanda or other low-profile stuff, and assures military officials that
they'll send someone a little more cooperative next time.
I'm exagerating for effect here of course...there's possibly not as much
conscious decision making, and supposedly this kind of list-making happens
for much quieter, "insider" stuff (not smart bomb footage). But clearly,
there's got to be SOMETHING like this happening.
-TD
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