“Why the media’s fact problems are much bigger than Rolling Stone.”
Link here.
For those who haven’t been following the story, Rolling Stone recently published an expose about a supposed gang-rape at a fraternity at the University of Virginia that they and their reporter used to illustrate the terrible rape culture of today’s universities.
The article has turned out to be largely a fabrication and has instead illustrated the terrible state of modern journalism as well as the corrupt truth-challenged intellectual elite of our society. Mollie Hemingway’s devastating analysis at the link above summarizes this situation nicely, also illustrating why much of what comes out of modern intellectual discussions today is total hogwash.
She doesn’t mention it, but I could not help thinking about global warming as well as the recent Orion test flight (“the spacecraft that will take us to Mars!”). In both cases the press has been seriously challenged to show some justifiable skepticism of official press releases and has failed miserably.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Link here.
For those who haven’t been following the story, Rolling Stone recently published an expose about a supposed gang-rape at a fraternity at the University of Virginia that they and their reporter used to illustrate the terrible rape culture of today’s universities.
The article has turned out to be largely a fabrication and has instead illustrated the terrible state of modern journalism as well as the corrupt truth-challenged intellectual elite of our society. Mollie Hemingway’s devastating analysis at the link above summarizes this situation nicely, also illustrating why much of what comes out of modern intellectual discussions today is total hogwash.
She doesn’t mention it, but I could not help thinking about global warming as well as the recent Orion test flight (“the spacecraft that will take us to Mars!”). In both cases the press has been seriously challenged to show some justifiable skepticism of official press releases and has failed miserably.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I had taken a Business English class in high school, and one of the lessons taught us how to write a press release as an article so that newspapers would not have to spend the resources to write their own article – they could just publish the press release as is. A few years later, I read an article about a French naval ship having an altercation with a Greenpeace ship, and it read as though Greenpeace had written the article.
The problem of poor journalism dates back decades. Fact checking the Greenpeace article may or may not have happened, as the article may have been accurate in its facts, but it was so slanted as to be horizontal (the one quote from a Frenchman made the French seem like the bad guys).
From Robert’s linked article: “We have a tsunami of inaccuracy that is generally tolerated, embraced and even celebrated so long as it serves the right political and cultural goals.”
I am reminded of the reporting after the Challenger accident, in which the press told us time and again that the contractors were writing “waivers” in order to hide deviations from accepted practices. The truth is the exact opposite. A waiver is a document written to explicitly ask permission from NASA to make such a deviation. It is documented and sent to NASA, and NASA must review it and respond with ‘go ahead’ or ‘keep looking for a better solution.’
Not only does it document the request, but it is probably the most documented piece of engineering in the whole design, as the contractor must explain why the accepted practice will not work in a particular case AND explain why and how the deviation will work reliably. Whenever an accepted practice is used, there is rarely any documentation as to why that practice was chosen over any other accepted practice that could have also worked.
Rather than hide a deviation (where and how the hell did the press get this notion, and how was it practically the entire press corps that reported such a lie?), it documents and broadcasts it, but we were told a complete lie by virtually every news agency. So much for fact checking, accuracy, and truth.
So, now we are subject to nationwide protests and riots, injured bystanders, disrupted traffic (heaven forbid that an ambulance loses a patient due to such blockage), damaged and burned buildings, and looting all because of similarly inaccurate reporting about two police incidents. The lies in the news are the rationalization for the misbehavior of these mobs, which advocate for the nullification of our law enforcement officers. (Please notice that it is the law abiders that ask for more police protection and the law breakers that demand less.)
Bad reporting has consequences: innocent people can get badly hurt and bad policy can be instituted; we can even lose the freedom to choose how and when to spend our own money. Yet here we are, a society that depends heavily upon its reporters and their journalistic integrity to make critical policy and voting decisions, allowing these reporters to get away with telling us nonsense that gets people hurt, killed, or maimed; gets people’s jobs or livelihoods destroyed, including personal and public property; and allows poor public policy and loss of freedoms. No wonder we think that Keynesian Economics, mandatory health insurance, and gun-free zones are the way to go, the news media likes them. And we don’t protest such lousy performance from our “fourth estate.”
From Robert’s linked article: “one out of five college women are either raped or victims of attempted rape. thats a fact.”
Yet the press is hard pressed to find any of these 20% of victims to write about. The victims that the press celebrates (in the celebrity sense) often seem to turn out to not be victims after all. Remember poor, innocent, infamous Robert Kennedy Smith? And who was the “blue dot” girl who falsely accused him? We did a good job protecting her name from infamy. How do any of us know that our next date isn’t with her, or that we will have the good luck to be saved from a lie, as Smith had?
What a cluster.