| | | OT: hey, it's the weekend and Mr. Dog has made it clear that OT rules are a bit relaxed on weekends.
Here's the thing, I was in the MSM for 11 years before I quit, walked away and started all over in the oilpatch. I started out as a reporter/photographer for a daily paper and worked my way up to managing editor and eventually publisher. I won 26 national and state awards for my journalism. And then I got fed up with the entire business and simply walked away -- I still owned 12% of the paper! I never looked back and boy am I glad I left when I did. At the time, my primary objection was the fact that it seemed like the advertising dept. had pretty much taken over the editorial content at many/most media outlets. Then we got "activist" ownerships that simply had axes to grind. I was taught to turn over every rock -- especially the slimy ones -- and simply report what was underneath -- no analysis needed -- political spin was grounds for dismissal.
Boy did that change around 1980 and completely disintegrated in less than 10 years it seemed like to me.
I am so ashamed of all of the media, mainstream or otherwise. Everyone's got an agenda, nobody checks their own facts (leaving that to the opposing view to do if they get around to it) and they pretty much just repeat what other people do or say word for word without any real questioning -- there's very little actual investigative journalism in the world these days. The only one that springs to mind in Matt Taibbi and of all places, he works for The Rolling Stone -- and yet he was the only journalist that got the financial crisis reporting right!
Here's proof of how low even the once prestigious media has fallen: when Murdoch took over the WSJ, he immediately held a meeting in the editorial offices. His orders to the reporters and editors were to screw getting the story right and just get the story first. Whatever one used to think about the WSJ, at least prior to that one could bank on the facts reported in it as gospel because they did such a thorough job of fact-checking before printing one word of any story.
As for the non-MSM, they are just as pathetic for the most part. There are some exceptions here and there, but the non-MSM doesn't even pretend to try to get things right, they only report things that support their political or world view 99% of the time and that's true across the entire spectrum from left to right to center to the fringes and everything in between.
And one thing I do agree with is that the complete breakdown of the media is the single biggest threat to this nation and to our freedom. All of the media have contributed to nothing more than muddying every single issue to the point the public got fed up long ago and stopped paying attention. That's why most "independent" or "swing" voters are actually just ignorant of what's really going on -- the media is so bad nobody cares what they say, let alone believes them -- or they only pay attn. to media outlets that say the things they want to hear vs. facts.
/rant |
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