On 04/04/2008 03:51 PM, Forinash III, Kyle wrote:
....
2) Reporters automatically assume that you are lying.
Oh, the way Judith Miller assumed Dick Cheney was lying, and
assumed those Iraqi defectors were lying?
I'm not talking about an isolated obscure anecdote:
-- This is a prize-winning author writing for the front page of
the world's "newspaper of record".
-- This is a subject of the highest importance. Calling it a
matter of life and death is an understatement.
-- There were many articles over many months.
-- Her chosen sources had an obvious motive for lying.
-- Don't tell me she couldn't have known better. I knew I
was being lied to at this time (late 2002, early 2003).
Sources for the other side of the story were readily
available to her (David Albright, IAEA, Knight-Ridder,
et cetera).
-- Judith Miller was not the only culprit.
More generally:
-- Sometimes the press sells a controversy when there should be
a consensus.
-- Sometimes the press sells a consensus when there should be a
controversy, i.e. when there really are two sides to the story.
-- Sometimes the press sells a consensus around completely wrong
facts, as we saw in the WMD saga, and in the ongoing wiretapping
saga: http://www.slate.com/id/2187498/pagenum/all/
-- The problems are not restricted to war or public policy. They
are not restricted to the Judith Miller or to Fox News. On *many*
occasions I have had first-hand knowledge of current events, and
found that the press coverage was at best tangentially related to
what actually happened.
I once watched a WSJ reporter spend six hours interviewing person
after person, maybe 100 persons in all, until he found one person
who seemingly agreed with his preconceived notion. He then wrote
the story he wanted to write, quoting that one person ... not
mentioning that the overwhelming consensus was directly opposite.
This had to do with research-lab working conditions.
Another time I watched as a TV crew did a similar thing, until
they found somebody who made a remark which was -- in context --
obviously facetious. They then snipped it out of context and
ran it as if it were not only his opinion but the established
fact. It wasn't true, not by a million miles, and they knew it.
This was a sweepstakes-related human-interest story.
Once in the middle of an economic downturn, the local paper ran
a story: "Hughes gets new contract, starts production on new
batch of missiles". They sold it as evidence of an economic
turnaround. The next day, hundreds of people were lined up at
the Hughes site, applying for jobs. The Hughes staff had to
explain that the "new" contract had been in the pipeline for
years, that it was a follow-on to an old contract, and the new
production rate was /less/ than the old production rate, so they
were not hiring, and were in fact laying people off. In this
case, was the paper lying, or just incredibly lazy and reckless?
I don't know. Either way, the effect on the job-seekers was
remarkably cruel.
I could go on and on, but I'll stop here for now. I hope this
suffices to make the point.