Quote:
Originally Posted by ThirdOfFive
Agree.
Remember back in the day, when “Uncle Walter” Cronkite was The Most Trusted Man In America? Things were different then. Three major networks reporting pretty much the same news in pretty much the same way five days per week for 1/2 hour each evening (an hour, later on, with MacNeil - Lehrer), with the punditry and opinionizing saved for Sunday mornings. There was news; short, sweet, and (we assumed) factual. There were the opinion shows on Sunday. And never the twain shall meet. Things were pretty clear.
Not so, today. Today there are dozens of “news” printers and broadcasters all vying for she same dollar, tailoring their product to this or that demographic or political point of view to the extent that virtually no domestic news outlet can be trusted for “just the facts”. Virtually everything is colored, spun, twisted and sensationalized to keep and satisfy their patrons as well as to attract more to their particular brand of “news”. I have no problem imagining that any one particular story can be disseminated by, say, five different outlets, and depending on the political slant of the outlet as well as how the story is phrased and spun, listeners or viewers can walk away with five totally different emotional reactions to the story that are more or less independent of the facts. A good example of this might be a story about a retiring member of Congress. Same story. Same facts. Same everything except for maybe two words. One story is about the “venerable statesman “ retiring from a lifetime of public service. The other concerns the same person, same facts, etc. but describes him as an “aging politician”. Dunno about the rest of you, but “venerable statesman” conjures up, for me anyway, a mental image of maybe Winston Churchill. “Aging politician”? Teddy Kennedy.
So too with these “stories” about shootings, often no more than wild conjecture based on very little few if any facts, but designed and spun to appeal to a certain demographic and thus guarantee and/or boost patronage. I recall many of them back in Minnesota. George Floyd. BLM. The “mostly peaceful” (gotta love that one!) demonstrations. Media had the population so stirred up that there were very few people who DIDN’T claim to know the story—but the “story” they knew was the one that they chose to listen to, and thus believe. INFORMATION didn’t matter. What mattered was VALIDATION. And you could pick and choose to find a source that validated any point of view that you might have.
Kudos to Lady Lake PD for handling this shooing in the way that they’re doing. Low-key. Get the facts first. Don’t sensationalize. Remember that this is a legal process, NOT a soap opera, no matter how many of us see it as a soap opera.
Come to think of it, shouldn’t ALL news be disseminated in that way?
|
They are talking the high road at Lady Lake PD.
My high school teacher's daughter was murdered on my birthday of 2-24 back in 1976 while I was a Junior at Earl Wooster HS in Reno, Nevada. Us students in her English classes were suspects and media was very much involved with this case as her husband was an English teacher at another high school in Reno, NV and the victim-- Michelle Mitchell-- was a 19 year old nursing student at the University of Nevada, Reno.
I had gone into libraries to help my fellow Earl Wooster HS students and myself cope with the investigation but could find NOTHING useful and starting planning on how I could do something about that niche of offering useful information.
They "solved" the murder in 1979 but wound up getting the wrong person which was discovered in a DNA test in 2014 of a cigarette that had been in evidence. Or, something like that. Turned out it was a SF area serial killer, Rodney Halbower, who had killed Michelle Mitchell. He had been in prison for a long time in Oregon for the rape of woman.
Paula Zahn did a program on the whole mess a few years ago interviewing the detective in charge of some of it. Her birthday is also 2-24. The murder of Michelle Mitchell was about twenty feet from the University of Nevada, Reno campus in a garage.