Official Off Topic Discussion Thread #1

[esoxlucius]

Okay, my wife just sent me this, knowing full well it would set me off on one of my favourite rant topics:

MSN

No, I don't rant about starfish.

My beef here is with a problem that I feel causes a lot of negative issues and yet seems to be rarely acknowledged or addressed: irresponsible journalism.

Some unknown biologist, desperate to publish something, comes to the "astonishing" conclusion that the community of bottom-dwelling marine life in arctic waters includes some organisms that are carnivorous. Well, duh! How is that surprising...or news...or any kind of "discovery"?

But that's not the issue here. It's when some "journalist" takes that bit of unremarkable data...and manages to dramatize it to:

There's a hungry Arctic predator with a lot of arms that eats polar bears!

Now, take that idiotic headline, and present it to an audience of people who typically get all their "news" from internet snippets like this. These folks don't question anything...and they certainly are far too busy to actually do any thinking themselves; I mean, that's why they have the internet, right?

So you get a bunch of misinformed morons who will fight to the death with you if you so much as suggest that they don't have a clue about the topic in question. Throw them into an environment, such as a lunchroom at work, with one or two people who rise to a stupid comment like a bass to a floating frog...not that I know anybody like that personally ...and potentially bad things ensue.

I won't even go into the horror of trying to explain to a member of one's own family who is, shall we say...gullible?...that there really is no cause for concern, and that they can go back to worrying about the Killer Death Stars that are poised to fry the Earth's surface with a lethal pulse of gamma radiation.

In a way, it's right. It's all worded very badly though with the aim to get people to click on it.

The starfish will eat polar bears that die and end up on the sea bed, nothing amazing about that, though a gullible reader will take that headline and imagine huge starfish coming out of the water and chasing the bears over the ice, lol.

Also, trillions of bacteria will do the same thing. So another headline that may be on the way soon could be, "Trillions of carnivorous polar bear eating monsters discovered in the Arctic".

How many people would click on that!

 

[jjohnwm]

In a way, it's right. It's all worded very badly though with the aim to get people to click on it.

The starfish will eat polar bears that die and end up on the sea bed, nothing amazing about that, though a gullible reader will take that headline and imagine huge starfish coming out of the water and chasing the bears over the ice, lol.

Also, trillions of bacteria will do the same thing. So another headline that may be on the way soon could be, "Trillions of carnivorous polar bear eating monsters discovered in the Arctic".

Agreed, it's technically not an outright lie; kind of surprising, really. I mean, they could have legally gotten away with calling them "man-eating", since a human body could be utilized the same way.

Of course, the polar bear today is one of the favourite poster children of the tree-hugging community; probably even more so than the adorable little white baby seals were only a few years ago.

My point is simply how far afield journalism has been allowed to roam. The stated goal of a journalist...when I was in school...was to explain Who, What, When, Where and How...even Why was considered, at that time, a semi-questionable area as it implied that the journalist was making guesses or interpretations regarding possible motivations of the people involved. Good journalism was supposed to briefly answer as many of these questions as possible, ideally in the first paragraph and preferably in the first sentence! A longer story could then expand and elaborate upon various aspects of the news item, but a reader could get the gist of of by simply scanning the first paragraph or sentence...and could then form some opinion as to whether or not he/she wanted to continue and glean more information.

But that was journalism...which was provided by journalists and reporters.

We don't have those anymore; we have pundits, analysts, experts, commentators and editorial reporters, all of whom are less interested in presenting the facts, and more interested in creating click-bait stories designed to whisk a reader from one screen crowded with advertising to the next.

And, amazingly, they are all entitled to pepper each story with their own feelings and interpretations and angles and spins...because we are just too dumb to have our own opinions and need to have them provided to us. After all, if you repeat something enough times...it becomes the truth, right?

 

[esoxlucius]

On the subject of ridiculous attention seeking headlines, take a look at this! This was from a UK paper, very popular at the time, and this was just one of many many totally insane headlines.

This paper was quite popular in the UK around the mid to late eighties/early nineties, before it's unsurprising demise, lol. No internet clicks here, just your hard earned cash going into the newsagents till.

 

[jjohnwm]

Looks like the National Enquirer, a well-known tabloid here in Canada and the U.S. back in the day.

Elvis living under a bridge in Queens...Sasquatch running for president...Earth under attack by superintelligent mutant cockroaches living in sewers...that kind of thing.

 

[esoxlucius]

Looks like the National Enquirer, a well-known tabloid here in Canada and the U.S. back in the day.

Elvis living under a bridge in Queens...Sasquatch running for president...Earth under attack by superintelligent mutant cockroaches living in sewers...that kind of thing.

Those headlines sound quite plausible, was there any truth in them, lol. Especially the president one......Trump!

 

[krichardson]

Looks like the National Enquirer, a well-known tabloid here in Canada and the U.S. back in the day.

Elvis living under a bridge in Queens...Sasquatch running for president...Earth under attack by superintelligent mutant cockroaches living in sewers...that kind of thing.

.....don't forget all the articles on the great Liberace!

 

[jjohnwm]

Those headlines sound quite plausible, was there any truth in them, lol. Especially the president one......Trump!

Well...this reporting was actually in print, on real paper and everything...so of course the stories were all true!

 

[Ulu]

Propaganda pieces, all. Because nobody’s going to bother with the boring truth.

Like, Russia can’t shoot nukes at Ukraine.

First, prevailing winds blow all the fallout right back on Russia. They had enough trouble after Chernobyl.

Second, Russia wants Ukraine uncontaminated so they can farm it, mine it, and use it as a warm water port. They really need Crimea for shipping and their navy. They need the resources uncontaminated.

But every day there is BS about nukes in the news.

Modern news is published by a bunch of fearmongers. Reporters wouldn’t write nonsense, except that idiots will publish any lie that makes money.

 

[krichardson]

Uh ohhhh.

 

[Supergeorge123]

Get 90 days free of Amazon Music Unlimited with your purchase of gonorrhea, eligible for return or refund within 30 days.