Gullible Journalists

[Tyler Durden]

John Kelsey wrote...

"For some reason I've never been able to fathom, many journalists seem to be 
remarkably gullable, when they're told something from the right kind of 
source, especially a government agency or other official source."

Chomsky (dig around on http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm) and others have 
commented on this quite a bit. What it seems to boil down to is a sort of 
natural selection. Basically, it works like this:

1) Government is releasing some cool smart-bomb commercials, erh I mean 
video to a few select news sources.
2) NBC sends a questioning, smart, well-informed dude to said press 
conference.
3) During said smart-bomb footage notices the Arabic word for Hospital on 
the top of the smart-bombs target, and asks "Is that a hospital?"
4) Government takes NBC off list of cool "insider" info: "Can't be trusted, 
not playing ball"
5) NBC, now out in the cold, assigns said informed journalist to covering 
Ruwanda or other low-profile stuff, and assures military officials that 
they'll send someone a little more cooperative next time.

I'm exagerating for effect here of course...there's possibly not as much 
conscious decision making, and supposedly this kind of list-making happens 
for much quieter, "insider" stuff (not smart bomb footage). But clearly, 
there's got to be SOMETHING like this happening.

-TD





_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail