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Sunday, October 01, 2017

Disclaimers in Journalism

      Don't you ever wish journalism came with disclaimers?  Especially broadcast journalism, which is pretty much a parasitic craft depending mainly on original research done by newspapers.  Warning:  CNN spends most of the workday getting story ideas from the newspapers and reading public figures' Twitter postings.  This sort of thing would clear up the misconception that the TV news game is anything other than the blind leading the blind.
      Sometimes even history is warped by bad journalism.  The false narrative of a one-sided slaughter fest in Bosnia is repeated as gospel truth, by people who should know better.  The reality is that most of the press pool got no further than the swankiest hotels in Sarajevo, and the information they received came from media-savvy Bosnian Muslims.  The fact that UN peacekeepers under General MacKenzie contradicted the narrative sold by the media and Peace &Love Inc. was swept under the rug.  Historians are as gullible as anyone else;  tell a historian something was said on The Most Trusted Name in Cable News, and they will dutifully report it as an historical fact twenty-five years later.  Of course historians would go out of business if they were forced to use disclaimers.  Warning:  Ken Burns tells only the liberal side of history--one in which Woodrow Wilson is a god among men, and Richard Nixon was a psychopath.

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