Newspapers vs the truth

[Speck Tater]

I read an article today in the local paper about a homicide that reminded me of something that happened over 30 years ago that has always shaped my thinking about newspapers.

This was in Los Angeles. I was casually acquainted with a man who ended up the victim of a homicide by multiple gunshot wounds. The newspaper account described the man as married, father of three, hard working, reliable, well liked by all his friends and neighbors, worked two jobs to put himself through some kind of trade school to better himself.

What I knew first hand was that he was a drug addict and a drug dealer. He was physically abusive to his wife and children. The wife's family had called child services on him several times for leaving drugs out where the kids could get into them, and leaving loaded handguns out where the children could get to them. Virtually everyone who knew him thought he was a mean bastard and most everyone agreed that not only did they NOT like him, but actively despised the S.O.B.

Clearly the newspaper interviewed a couple neighbors in the apartment building who really didn't know the guy and printed what they were told as the gospel. Clearly the police knew what was up because they fingered the drug dealer who pulled the trigger in pretty short order. But the newspaper didn't have a clue.

That first hand experience taught me that probably 90% of everything you read in the newspapers is pure B.S. either collected from source who don't have a clue, made up on the spot, or distorted beyond all recognition.

That's why I take it with a HUGE grain of salt when I read stories about police tazering a helpless 12-year old, or some similar outrage that has us eagerly jumping to the conclusion that we live in a police state.

Before over-reacting, stop, take a deep breath, and consider that the newspaper story is probably 90% B.S., and that it is virtually certain that many very significant facts were left out of the story.

We all, as a country, need to grow up and mellow out and stop jumping immediately to whatever conclusion best fits our political bias. We don't need for the population to keep their fingers on a hair trigger waiting for some fresh outrage to explode over.

(End of rant)

[elleng]

1. Reminds me of my years in Chicago,

where I kept informed about 'local' stuff, politics, law and order, etc.

I remember noting that I never read a news story about something with which I was familiar that was true and correct.

Maybe not a police state, but surely an uninformed 'democracy.'

[BlooInBloo]

2. Garbage in, garbage out. The results of a stupid public.

[stillcool]

4. what is written in newspapers..

is the result of a 'stupid' public? I thought it was the opposite. I can't imagine how the public is supposed to be 'smart' when we have no access to information, or truth. Everything is guess work, theory, and folk lore. If it weren't for the time I now have to peruse the internet, I would be a lot stupider than the stupid American I am. Back when I was working 2 jobs and my only time off was spent sleeping I was really, really stupid.

[BlooInBloo]

5. Nope. A stupid population is what allowed the system(s) to be instituted in the first place....

And is also what perpetuates them.


EDIT: And "stupid" is really shorthand for "stupid, mean, and bigoted", I suppose.

[stillcool]

7. what year would you say the..

stupidity started? 1776?

[BlooInBloo]

8. Who cares? Every moment it's perpetuated, it's new again...

Like a lie is thought of in jurisprudence.

[stillcool]

9. I guess things are the way they've always been...

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them.
- Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens),
Following the Equator (ch. 20)


The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
- Thomas Jefferson

If the newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.
- James Fenimore Cooper

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
- Norman Mailer

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
- Henry Louis Mencken


Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.
- George Bernard Shaw

An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.
- Adlai E. Stevenson

[Fed_Up_Grammy]

3. I take it ALL with a grain of salt. Newspapers,radio,TV,and internet.

[Muttocracy]

6. I think I've been quoted in newspapers twice in my life

both times quotes messed up.