Not Waiting For The Asteroid – small dead animals

Reporters and editors, including myself, were reluctant to run stories detailing positive developments, such as a decline in al-Qaeda attacks, because it would look foolish if it appeared the same day insurgents wreaked havoc by setting off a deadly bomb.

10 Replies to “Not Waiting For The Asteroid”

They are news managers with a political bias – not news reporters. A reporter would not have any fear of being embarrassed by changing events if he/she has consistently reported events without political filters as they happened.

Hmmm…well what happened to simply reporting the news? If there was a bomb yesterday, you report a bomb. If there is no bomb today you report no bomb. If there is a bomb tomorrow you report a bomb again.
Engineering the news just doesn’t work — journalists need to stop being our social workers and psychologists. They can save that sort of stuff for their commentary and punditry after the news, but meanwhile I need the simple facts in order to decide for myself.

Walter Cronkite knew that we had utterly destroyed the VC, had battered the NVA to irrelevance but still trumpeted TET as our defeat.
That goes far beyond bias into seditious propaganda……

With all due respect to the first commenter, it is actually news based entertainment.

The terrorists are winning when the population lives in fear of what they will do.
Much as I have misgivings about including journo-lists in the group generally considered as the population it is obvious that their fear leads to an overstatement of the terrorists success or an understatement of our success which leads to more fear on the journo-lists which leads to them reporting more about terrorist initiatives and our set backs which reinforces the fear. The journo-lists are indeed part of the population, but they are the those that yell fire in the crowded theatre and report on the subsequent carnage and clamor for withdrawl from theatres or more regulation of theatres and their patrons.

“This wasn’t a matter of bias, or rooting for failure, or some perverse desire to deliver only a grim picture to Americans back home“.
Of course not. I find it interesting that such unprofessional motives should actually occur to the writer (only to be dismissed, of course). I find it interesting, too, that the writer has acquired a sudden interest in balance now that a far left Democrat is in office. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, though.

“If we applied today’s standards to conventional war, the headline after D-Day would have read: ‘10,000 Allies Killed or Wounded in Record Violence’.”
In a sentence, the writer illustrates why we held journalists in fairly high regard 70 years ago, and why we hold them in such contempt today.

So let me get this straight – their theory is that if they actually report the facts, they will look foolish.
Got it.

Reporters used to provide news and information. Now they provide entertainment, loosely based on current events, mainly to sell advertising.

I find it hard to take serious anyone who would write:
“But we need to change the way we approach the news — widen our aperture — so we are better able to sense developments that are outside the narrow window of the day’s bombing and violence”
Followed by:
“More U.S. troops are flooding into the country in a last-ditch effort to take initiative from the enemy. ”
3 sentences later.

10 Replies to “Not Waiting For The Asteroid”

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