Well said. At last, someone who understands the world they live in.
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Where do "news" outlets draw the line?
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Roger Krueger
Senior Member
What indeed is the world coming to when we're all so squeamish?
People die for our squeamishness.
If we published mangled, decapitated, etc. DUI victims we'd think a heck of a lot differently about it. As long as it's just an abstract concept it's pretty easy to rationalize.
Mexico is completely missing this sense that reality needs to be covered up. They have mainstream tabloids devoted to gore, and even vanilla news shows far more than their U.S. counterparts.
When some wasted American rear-ended a Mexican family hard enough to make their car burst into flames and kill them, U.S. news outlets ran a tarp-covered car that was shot hours later. Mexican papers ran a shot with a still-smoldering crispy critter sitting in the front seat. Uncomfortable, but with that image seared into your brain you're gonna find a designated driver.
People die for our squeamishness.
If we published mangled, decapitated, etc. DUI victims we'd think a heck of a lot differently about it. As long as it's just an abstract concept it's pretty easy to rationalize.
Mexico is completely missing this sense that reality needs to be covered up. They have mainstream tabloids devoted to gore, and even vanilla news shows far more than their U.S. counterparts.
When some wasted American rear-ended a Mexican family hard enough to make their car burst into flames and kill them, U.S. news outlets ran a tarp-covered car that was shot hours later. Mexican papers ran a shot with a still-smoldering crispy critter sitting in the front seat. Uncomfortable, but with that image seared into your brain you're gonna find a designated driver.
mamallama
Forum Pro
Sounds like you approve of this sort of "news" coverage. To you, it seems just a matter of squeamishness? And the news should be the means to set examples and teach people a lesson?
Maybe that's why so many Mexicans are trying to come to the US, legally or not.
--mamallama
Maybe or maybe not. But how many markets pick up the footage is another observation. This particular game held not interest in my tiny community and certainly would NOT have been reported on if it weren't for that morbid incident. And how much of the video clip they chose to show in their report, if any of it at all, or the decision the replay the "action part" several times, or maybe just show a still pic from the video?
All of these are questions SOME editors probably ask out load each and every day.
My Youtube question/observation is a fair one and's certainly applicable to the broader discussion of what constitutes tasteful news, how our news is reported, and where is the line drawn. You would certainly agree that Youtube and other social media sites have an impact on who, how, what, where, why the traditional media functions?
With attitudes like yours I can see what drives these outlets to publish this junk. You have a callous, relativist, secular attitude toward the world that's all too common these days. Very sad, indeed. It's as if you have no standards.
And the larger discussion is how "new media" influences traditional media and us old geezers that still get their news from a tube television with rabbit ears. And the desensitizing of our youth.
Posting in forum open to the public is an invitation to be lectured...so if you don't want to be lectured, keep quiet.
You don't understand much about the world...do you.
.
You think so?
So Mexico has their act together, is that right? Very little drunk driving down there, yes? I'm sure you researched the matter and have impartial study data to back it up?
I'm sure.
I'm with MusicDoctor on this. A man fell to his death, in front of his 6 year old son, during a nationally televised baseball game. I think this was going to make the news YouTube or not.
That being said, some new outlets have seen fit to report on this without sensationalizing it. ESPN has been covering this quite a bit and I have yet to see them actually show the video.
That being said, some new outlets have seen fit to report on this without sensationalizing it. ESPN has been covering this quite a bit and I have yet to see them actually show the video.
Ed Rizk
Senior Member
...stories that have no national impact, even going so far as to run missing persons stories on national news. Casey Anthony is a local murder in Florida and her case has no national impact.
I don't mind the gore, I just want more information on relevant topics. These local stories run as national news take time away from the relevant.
BTW, whoever it was that wanted unbiased coverage, there is only one way to get it. Watch FOX and MSNBC. They like everyone else think they are unbiased. Even choosing which facts or stories will be reported by others is going to be colored by the opinions of the person choosing. Objectivity is a state of perfection like fairness or equality. Look for perfection in the next world, not this one.
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Ed Rizk
I don't mind the gore, I just want more information on relevant topics. These local stories run as national news take time away from the relevant.
BTW, whoever it was that wanted unbiased coverage, there is only one way to get it. Watch FOX and MSNBC. They like everyone else think they are unbiased. Even choosing which facts or stories will be reported by others is going to be colored by the opinions of the person choosing. Objectivity is a state of perfection like fairness or equality. Look for perfection in the next world, not this one.
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Ed Rizk
mamallama
Forum Pro
Making the news is not the issue. Showing the video of the actual fall to his death is the issue. For example, no one can object to the report of Jane Mansfield's death by car accident, but had there been video or film of her being decapitated and shown on TV, I think there would be objection.
--mamallama
mamallama
Forum Pro
The national impact of this case is obvious: A deranged mother who kills her child and legally gets away with it is of national interest, regardless of where it happened.
That would be true if the means of reporting the news were limited. It's virtually unlimited.
I don't think either Fox or MSNBC think they are unbiased. No one is that stupid. Even Chris Wallace admitted to Jon Stewart that Fox is biased because it feels it needs to counterbalance the mainstream media.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwyUdBp-cck
--mamallama
As well all know, anyone who lives a religious life, would have no interest in the video at all.
Did you know that the world is flat?
As opposed to the good old days when half the population died when they were kids, and death and violence were far more common, and visible then they are now. Of course in the good old days, you could bring the whole family to watch a public hanging, No need for the tube.
Dave
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"Everyone who has ever lived, has lived in Modern Times"
Is it any different than a racing crash?
This world was lost a long time ago. If you want to know how you ought to read the published and banned works of Antony C. Sutton. If I were a WWII vet I would be resurrecting from the grave and taking over the govt. That will be coming anyway in a different form and it will be legal with no appeal... world wide.
There is a term for those who don't want it. Terrified Panic.
Call it Meet the Maker over the way you run the world. It got noticed.
At least a live camera is harder to lie with. Give it credit.
I don't know what you will do if you ever witness a bad car crash, industrial accident, or homocide. You have been sterilized by common TV.
Torch
This world was lost a long time ago. If you want to know how you ought to read the published and banned works of Antony C. Sutton. If I were a WWII vet I would be resurrecting from the grave and taking over the govt. That will be coming anyway in a different form and it will be legal with no appeal... world wide.
There is a term for those who don't want it. Terrified Panic.
Call it Meet the Maker over the way you run the world. It got noticed.
At least a live camera is harder to lie with. Give it credit.
I don't know what you will do if you ever witness a bad car crash, industrial accident, or homocide. You have been sterilized by common TV.
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Torch
Ed Rizk
Senior Member
It's a local murder. There is one in every major city every day. This one just happens to be more photogenic.
Most of the uneducated people just follow the network news and consume what they are fed. Even if it were an important story, it is fully explained, and every possible point of view is beaten to death, in far less time than they spend on it.
Happily, you are mostly correct on this count. The previous pretense of objectivity and that of many organizations today is the most dishonest form of propaganda.
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Ed Rizk
mamallama
Forum Pro
If you think that the Casey Anthony murder case is just like the ones that happen in every major city every day, I put you in that class of people who just follow the network news and consume what they are fed.
--mamallama
Roger Krueger
Senior Member
It is at least factually accurate and devoid of spin, something I can't say for a lot of news content.
Yes. A "Look away and/or cover your kids eyes if you're so inclined" seems sufficient for those who need to avoid it.
It's not a goal per se, but it's often a useful by-product.
Yeah, right. Or maybe it's the jobs.Maybe that's why so many Mexicans are trying to come to the US, legally or not.
Ed Herdman
Well-known member
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/04/23/inside-the-shadowy-world-of-phone-hacking.html
I posted this somewhere before, and shall do it again. It's a great article, and a good reminder to people who mistakenly think that the British phone hacking case was the symptom of a new era of journalism (though it might end up opening a new era of journalism, by accident).
The firefighter who died at Rangers field - this comes on the heels of somebody else falling on their head (elsewhere in the stadium) a year and a day before the event. The news isn't necessarily "smart" coverage, but what they do very well is help shine a spotlight on areas that need attention. Sometimes they filter it ahead of time (was FDR's disability worthy of coverage?) and sometimes they don't. Ultimately, somebody has to make a call, and when it comes out right we see a light shining into the darkness. There has been a great victory for freedom in England recently as the papers proved that you could actually fight what was de facto corruption in the police, the government, and other papers, and actually win. (Though the Guardian is doing poorly, if I remember right.) Is the media's obsession with mine disaster, weather phenomena, oil spills, and wildfire an example of them falling asleep on the job? How much has your awareness of these and other problems been enhanced by the media? If the media didn't crawl over every inch of New Orleans after the hurricane, for example, we never would have had a public airing of the tough choices made at Memorial Medical Center, for example.
The Anthony case - the media have for the most part been terrible on it. The "Headline News" (aka "the Anthony Case 24/7" while the trial was on) channel of CNN had a clueless bunch on; Nancy Grace is flatly trying to pervert the course of justice while giving completely unbelievable defenses for using the term "TotMom" instead of referring to the defendant properly; Geraldo Riviera (of The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults) gives an audience to Mark Fuhrman (Marcia Clark was on HLN instead). Put all these characters in the echo chamber and none of them seemed to understand how the justice system is meant to work, or indeed in this case how it does work. How many times did I hear "Why didn't the defense talk about ..."? Too many times. (Hint: The defense is obligated not to evoke false testimony or knowingly perjure a witness.)
The one person past the event horizon in that great vortex of disinformation that is television news who I saw present a good rundown of why the verdict came out the only way it reasonably could have was, to my incredible surprise, Sean Hannity of Fox News (I was surprised because he was essentially mirroring my own conclusions made beforehand). As one of his guests said: You can hate, hate, hate this verdict, but we have to preserve the justice system. It's better to let a murderer walk free - a person who will be constantly under the microscope from here on out - than it is to convict an innocent person. You can't trust prosecutors to have a good case to take away somebody's life. You can't trust the police not to falsify evidence, as happened in the O.J. Simpson trial. You can't trust that a conviction will protect the people, as the sensational 1950 execution of Timothy Evans in the U.K. left the serial killer who framed him free (10 Rillington Place goes into this in some detail). In the Anthony case, we really never heard a cohesive argument about what happened that tore away reasonable doubt that something else could have happened without the defendant's involvement. There was no motive (one point that Geraldo has been pretty adamant about, to his credit, is that there is no evidence indicting the mother's behavior towards her daughter). There were simply too many errors (and lies, including from the Anthony family) to tack anything down, and what was left was a tangle of potential conspiracies and relatively weak circumstances on which to convict Ms. Anthony. The Caylee's Law being proposed also seems to pose some challenges against the presumption of innocence, but that's for another time, I hope...
I posted this somewhere before, and shall do it again. It's a great article, and a good reminder to people who mistakenly think that the British phone hacking case was the symptom of a new era of journalism (though it might end up opening a new era of journalism, by accident).
The firefighter who died at Rangers field - this comes on the heels of somebody else falling on their head (elsewhere in the stadium) a year and a day before the event. The news isn't necessarily "smart" coverage, but what they do very well is help shine a spotlight on areas that need attention. Sometimes they filter it ahead of time (was FDR's disability worthy of coverage?) and sometimes they don't. Ultimately, somebody has to make a call, and when it comes out right we see a light shining into the darkness. There has been a great victory for freedom in England recently as the papers proved that you could actually fight what was de facto corruption in the police, the government, and other papers, and actually win. (Though the Guardian is doing poorly, if I remember right.) Is the media's obsession with mine disaster, weather phenomena, oil spills, and wildfire an example of them falling asleep on the job? How much has your awareness of these and other problems been enhanced by the media? If the media didn't crawl over every inch of New Orleans after the hurricane, for example, we never would have had a public airing of the tough choices made at Memorial Medical Center, for example.
The Anthony case - the media have for the most part been terrible on it. The "Headline News" (aka "the Anthony Case 24/7" while the trial was on) channel of CNN had a clueless bunch on; Nancy Grace is flatly trying to pervert the course of justice while giving completely unbelievable defenses for using the term "TotMom" instead of referring to the defendant properly; Geraldo Riviera (of The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults) gives an audience to Mark Fuhrman (Marcia Clark was on HLN instead). Put all these characters in the echo chamber and none of them seemed to understand how the justice system is meant to work, or indeed in this case how it does work. How many times did I hear "Why didn't the defense talk about ..."? Too many times. (Hint: The defense is obligated not to evoke false testimony or knowingly perjure a witness.)
The one person past the event horizon in that great vortex of disinformation that is television news who I saw present a good rundown of why the verdict came out the only way it reasonably could have was, to my incredible surprise, Sean Hannity of Fox News (I was surprised because he was essentially mirroring my own conclusions made beforehand). As one of his guests said: You can hate, hate, hate this verdict, but we have to preserve the justice system. It's better to let a murderer walk free - a person who will be constantly under the microscope from here on out - than it is to convict an innocent person. You can't trust prosecutors to have a good case to take away somebody's life. You can't trust the police not to falsify evidence, as happened in the O.J. Simpson trial. You can't trust that a conviction will protect the people, as the sensational 1950 execution of Timothy Evans in the U.K. left the serial killer who framed him free (10 Rillington Place goes into this in some detail). In the Anthony case, we really never heard a cohesive argument about what happened that tore away reasonable doubt that something else could have happened without the defendant's involvement. There was no motive (one point that Geraldo has been pretty adamant about, to his credit, is that there is no evidence indicting the mother's behavior towards her daughter). There were simply too many errors (and lies, including from the Anthony family) to tack anything down, and what was left was a tangle of potential conspiracies and relatively weak circumstances on which to convict Ms. Anthony. The Caylee's Law being proposed also seems to pose some challenges against the presumption of innocence, but that's for another time, I hope...
Roger Krueger
Senior Member
But they do draw the line. And generally, the more effort they put into intelligent journalism the more conservatively they draw said line.
Even bias you can mostly mentally correct for once you understand it's there.
Sloppiness/superficiality is a lot harder. Every single time an event I've had personal knowledge of made the news (barring sports scores and other trivia) it was materially wrong or had misleading omissions. I can only assume the 99.9% of things I don't have personal knowledge of are similarly sloppily reported. To-the-bone budgets just don't allow reporters the time to cover stories carefully.
beshannon
Senior Member
So what exactly are you watching the local "news" for anyway?
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JulesJ
Forum Pro
This is nothing new. Have you not seen the horrific old (30's?) b&w footage of the airship, at first being held from lifting higher by many men and ropes. Some let go and the airship starts lifting. As more men drop to the ground it then becomes lighter and too high for any more to drop safely, but because they cannot hold on indefinitely they do drop and many die. There's not a lot new in the news today
Jules
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