What if the news wanted to lie to you? Nightly telling you lies? Looking specifically for you to be gullible?
Would it matter what ideology the news was? Or do you think any reporter purposely lying to millions of people should have a job?
Do you think if you can believe it then it is not lies?
What if it was always lies?
What if things and ideas you entirely disagree with have always been the truth?
Given the consistent diet of hype and hysteria the media, of every stripe, dishes out these days, I figure everything, everyone competing for viewers/listeners/followers dishes out, needs to be scrutinized.
I sat in on a historical lecture about a WWII aircraft plant a few weeks ago. There has been a narrative about the odd shape of that plant, that has been around for decades, which I highly doubt. The lecturer on this go around took that nonsense to new heights, implausible heights, could not happen, heights, but no-one else in the audience called him out on it. I know it was fake. I read the provisions of the contract governing that plant, in the Federal Register from 1941.
Another lecture I attended this winter touched on that same plant. That lecturer did not make such an pazoo of himself, so I felt more comfortable pushing back on that narrative during the Q&A session.
Steve
Okay - I couldnât find âpazooâ - did you mean âpazzoâ? OR is there some definition for your word you would like to share? For others, as an FYI, pazzo means figuratively crazy!
Steve,
You are much more of a diplomat than I am.
That means also that you let people believe what they want. They will anyway but I can not help thinking taking them out of the lies is better than being told lies are expertise.
I am talking the nightly news at prime time.
Probably an Italian word.
Pazo in Italian means crazy in English.
It is a substitute for a particular, round, fluffy, part of anatomy, because the censor would not let me use what I meant, even when I substituted dollar signs for a pair of "s"es.
The narrative is the odd shape of the plant was because Henry Ford had such animus toward Wayne County that he did not want one inch of the plant in that county. This is fertilizer, on the face of it, because, at the same time Ford was building that plant, they built an aircraft engine plant at the Rouge complex, which is entirely in Wayne County, and the engine plant was almost as big as the bomber plant.
The two part logical explanation for the shape of the plant, is
1: the scope of work changed after construction was started on the plant. The change in scope of work required the plant be built longer, but there was no room between where the partly built plant was, and where the partly built airport was, to make the plant longer in a straight line.
2: If the plant did straddle the county line, and Ford exercised itâs option to buy the plant after the war, then Ford would have to apportion the plant, and itâs contents, between the two counties and make two tax filings. By keeping the plant entirely in one county, the accounting departmentâs work would be reduced. (this is what I said in the Q&A session)
The real howler was the guy that said Wayne County was going to tax every B-24 that rolled out of the plant, and Henryâs hate for Wayne County was so extreme, that he did not want the county to see a nickle. This is absolute BS. By the provisions of the contract, during war production, the plant, all itâs contents, and those B-24s were all the property of the Federal government, not Ford, and the Federal government did not pay local taxes.
Steve
Thanks for the explanation and definition.
I will now add âpazooâ to my personal urban dictionary for use in future rants!
Have any of you read, âFactfulessâ?
Blockquote
What if the new organizations thought so little of you that indoctrinating simply doesnât matter.
Take the Fox news law suit. Turns out, no one in the organization believed what they were saying and didnât care. All they wanted was viewers to view. What they have not admitted was that the also, and this is most important, wanted the viewers to emotionally engage.
I am not singling Fox out. There are no news organizations with video, and few in print, that do not seek to engage emotionally.
If you see or hear any news bit that cannot be digested while in a deep meditative state while watching the sun rise and listening to the gulls. It has a large element of falsehood.
This even applies the the nightly weather report.
Emotion and memory - Wikipedia
Cheers
Qazulught
Qaz,
It is not that simple that they all somehow mislead. There is an editorial process.
We have had the 1981 to 2020 be the destruction of much of our economy. Proposed as the absolute truth so that people seem to think lies involving supply side economics are the forceful truth.
With Fox you might expect some editorial concept of getting it right. That is their job. Instead you have blatant lies to mislead the American public with more forcefulness. That is not simple dishonesty or a bad weather reporter.
âThis is killing the stock priceâ. And some on this board wonder why I am so adamant that âcorporations exist solely to provide ROI for shareholdersâ is wrong and dangerous.
Clearly those hosts are paid with stock options as well as cash. That is not true at the major networks or at CNN, and I have experience with those contracts (or at least did when I was in the business.) It is possible that has changed but I doubt it, itâs not how they think.
I would disagree vehemently with many of the other thoughts expressed in this thread, but time doesnât allow. For the record, most news organizations make mistakes, occasionally whoppers, but most of what gets passed on is as good as they can conveniently shape it, relative to audience expectations and costs allow. (The audience will not sit for a 20 minute explanation of arcane economic theory, for instance.) And often the âfirst rough draftâ of history is short sighted, incomplete, or just wrong, but on balance it is mostly decent people, liberals and conservatives, older and younger, trying to do a good job, and mostly succeeding.
When I say ânews organizationsâ I specifically exclude Fox, which bills itself ânewsâ but as internal communications aptly demonstrate is anything but; it is a propaganda machine, and I exclude most bloggers since they typically have agendas, and nearly all radio talk show hosts (who, by definition, are not ânewsâ reporters.)
That seems to be true of all media today: competition for eyeballs and revenue.
I have commented before on what has become the daily âsevere weatherâ hysteria. I have a theory: twenty years ago, the media was promoting hysteria about âIslamic terroristsâ, running the same tired footage of âterrorists trainingâ, while flogging the latest rumor about supposed terrorist plots. The government would quietly back down the âterrorist threat levelâ, then raise it again, so the media would be screaming âTERRORIST THREAT LEVEL INCREASEDâ. After a while, there was not enough âterroristâ content to keep people terrified, so someone hit on the idea of stoking hysteria about the weather, because there is weather, somewhere, every day. So, now, there are no snow âflurriesâ, or rain âshowersâ. Everything is a âstormâ and all âstormsâ are SEVERE. They scream, daily, about every weather system as if itâs the end of the world, and, if some damage actually does occur, they rehash it for days, until there is a new weather system to scream about.
Additionally, all ânewsâ is now âBREAKING NEWSâ. Even if they have been reporting on a particular story for days, every entry is touted as âBREAKING NEWSâ.
Then there is the advertising dressed up as ânewsâ. The local ânewsâ does Black Friday pieces interviewing people lined up at Best Buy, and touting the âdoor busterâ specials the store offers. All ânewsâ, local and national, goes nuts over the latest Apple product, touting itâs features, where it can be bought and when it will be available.
Steve
But one organization in particular seems to be taking this at least one order of magnitude higher than the others. There is not much equivalence here.
Sure. Like âfakeâ news.LOL
The Main Stream Media prefers that story over Sy Hershâs story which the Main Stream Media has ignored.
Who would have better capability to accomplish such a mission? The US or the Ukraine?
He claims the US operated out of Norway.
We do know that Norway & the US benefited from the destruction of Nord Stream Pipeline.
Apparently the the story that Ukrainians took out Nord Stream was too big of a whopper for the Europeans.
Their message: Donât put this intel on us, and weâre not touching it.
It wasnât said that Ukrainians did it; rather that âpro-Ukrainiansâ did. For example, the US is pro-Ukrainian.
DB2
The story evolves:
Tagging on the basic media criticism that has been part of this thread: I read the Hersh blog and find it interesting. Iâm not sure itâs compelling, but Iâll stipulate it could be true.
The reality is that he (nor any reporter) isnât born with immaculate knowledge. They rely on sources, and as we saw on the run-up to the Iraq War 2, those may have their own agendas. Like Dick Cheney âleakingâ to the New York Times, then pointing to the New York Times in his many TV appearances as âproofâ that there must be WMD around there someplace, reporters can be âusedâ by those in power (or even not in power, just in a position to know something.)
Since Hersh will never say who his sources really are (since no one would ever talk to him again), we must trust that he trusts them, and that he would not publish something like this unless he believed it to be true. To do otherwise is to do a Judith Miller career swan dive if the story proves to be a falsehood.
There is enough detail in the post to make an interesting and readable story, but itâs difficult for me to get my head around the idea that J** B**** thought blowing up a pipeline and fouling hundreds of miles of water was a good idea, especially if the truth came out.
(I donât believe Hersh on everything, for instance his odd take on the killing of Bin Laden seems the product of some alternate reality, or perhaps something dreamed up by those embarrassed by the episode looking to push an exculpatory narrative.) It will be interesting to see if this story has legs, gets confirmed somehow, or is refuted by anything other than a bunch of people saying âWasnât us!â
Sources can find the most interesting advantages in âuseful idiots.â No insult intended, Sy.
I read that NYT piece and saw through it as well.
But the story is geared at a very different matter supporting the US during a war. A war where many many people are and can die. There is a job to do.
The Fox stuff was not doing anything for our nation. Regardless of the lies that those lies were some sort of national defense. In fact now exposed that national defense argument is no where in sight.
I agree with what the Times is doing.
