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Made in gb
Stealthy Warhound Titan Princeps





South Wales

When you own up to it with a public apology, AFTER YOU GET CAUGHT, feth you. End of.

Prestor Jon wrote:
Because children don't have any legal rights until they're adults. A minor is the responsiblity of the parent and has no legal rights except through his/her legal guardian or parent.
 
   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Leerstetten, Germany

 whembly wrote:
And I know you're smart enough to realize that the Falklands war, was exactly that, a war. And that most of the reporters "worked" in Buenos Aires during this event. Furthermore, war zones do not cease being war zones the second one side capitulates. The so called rioting that ensued in the aftermath of Argentina’s surrender is a clear example of that reality.


The Falkland Wars were in fact a war. And most of the reporters did in fact work out of Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires never ceased being a war zone, it never was a war zone. Unless there was some significant military action by the British against Buenos Aires that everybody forgot to report, BO and all the other reporters were safely tucked away from any actual "war zone".




So, if you want to ding BO for equating riots to a warzone... sure, go ahead.


Nobody is dinging BO for equating riots to a warzone. People are dinging BO for pretenting that he was covering an active war in an active war zone when he was in fact reporting a riot many miles away from a war zone.

But, forgive me when I roll my eyes if you believe this is a "Brian Williams" moment.


They are both reporters lying about being present in an active war zone.

Everybody that is leaning "left" on this website quickly commented that Williams is an idiot and that he should pay a price. But people leaning "right" are going out of their way to defend "their guy" even though they don't even care about "their guy".
   
Made in au
The Dread Evil Lord Varlak





 whembly wrote:
Heh... so, following this logic to call out O'Reilly....

We going to call out these folks over Ferguson?


Consider these two statements;
“I was in Ferguson, which looked like a warzone.”
“I was in a warzone.”

The first establishes that someone was in a riot, and then uses a simile to point out that that riot was extremely violent and chaotic. The latter is telling someone they were in an actual warzone.

This really can’t be more obvious. They teach simile and metaphor in primary school, it’s basic stuff. Trying to act as if someone using warzone in a simile is the same as saying they were actually in a warzone choosing to believe what is politically convenient for you, as opposed to what you know is actually true.

“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”

Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something. 
   
Made in us
Gore-Soaked Lunatic Witchhunter




Seattle

Adding to this, Bill O'Reilly has been called out on his claim that he personally heard the gunshot fired by George de Mohrenschildt in his commission of suicide.

For those who don't know, Mohrenschildt was a close friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, and was under investigation following the Kennedy assassination. Bill O'Reilly claims that he was standing outside Mohrenschildt's door in Florida when the man killed himself... others who knew Bill O'Reilly at the time, and others who were involved with the press at the time, have stated that O'Reilly was in Dallas at the time of the shooting (not Florida) and stole the story (and made himself a central figure in it) from a Dallas newspaper.

More info:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/02/24/oreilly-lied-about-suicide-of-jfk-assassination/202655

It is best to be a pessimist. You are usually right and, when you're wrong, you're pleasantly surprised. 
   
Made in us
Blood Angel Captain Wracked with Visions






Looks like this in contagious; http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2015/02/24/head-of-veterans-affairs-caught-exaggerating-about-military-service/

WASHINGTON (WJZ) — Major misstatement of the facts. This time, it comes from a member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet. CBS News captured the Secretary of Veterans Affairs bragging about being in the special forces—but it’s a false claim he now admits to.
Mary Bubala has more.
The exchange happened in January as a CBS News crew followed Secretary Robert McDonald. He was touring the streets of Los Angeles counting homeless veterans as part of a VA program to help them find housing.
The veteran said he was part of special forces and McDonald said he was, too, and asked the veteran which years.

But McDonald was not in the special forces. Instead, he served mostly with the 82nd Airborne division as a paratrooper. His discrepancy was first reported by Huffington Post and late Monday afternoon, he spoke out about his exaggeration.
“I made a mistake. I apologize for that. I have no excuse for it,” McDonald said. “It was a misstatement. It was a mistake.”
McDonald is a West Point graduate handpicked by President Obama to clean up a Veterans Affairs department plagued by scandal. Obama says he’s taking McDonald at his word that this was a misstatement on the fly and not a pattern of exaggeration.
McDonald took office in July. He’s the former CEO of Proctor & Gamble.

 
   
Made in us
Secret Force Behind the Rise of the Tau




USA

I saw that on the Daily Show the other day. Funny bit



   
Made in us
Last Remaining Whole C'Tan






Pleasant Valley, Iowa

As McDonald actually went to Ranger school at least I could sort of believe it was a misstatement, as opposed to a bald faced lie.

On the other hand, he had a whopper just a few weeks beforehand, so....

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.

 Flinty wrote:
The benefit of slate is that its.actually a.rock with rock like properties. The downside is that it's a rock
 
   
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Pleasant Valley, Iowa

And more from the Billghazi scandal

Bill O'Reilly's LA riots 'bombardment' stories disputed by former colleagues
Thursday 26 February 2015 17.33 EST Last modified on Thursday 26 February 2015 18.55 EST

Former colleagues of Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host whose tales of past reporting exploits are facing renewed scrutiny, have disputed his account of surviving a bombardment of bricks and rocks while covering the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

Six people who covered the riots with O’Reilly in California for Inside Edition told the Guardian they did not recall an incident in which, as O’Reilly has claimed, “concrete was raining down on us” and “we were attacked by protesters”.

Several members of the team suggested that O’Reilly may instead be overstating a fracas involving one disgruntled Los Angeles resident, who smashed one of their cameras with a piece of rubble.

Two of the team said the man was angered specifically by O’Reilly behaving disrespectfully after arriving at the smoking remains of his neighbourhood in a limousine, whose driver at one point began polishing the vehicle. O’Reilly is said to have shouted at the man and asked him: “Don’t you know who I am?”

O’Reilly, 65, is one of the most influential figures in American broadcasting and publishing. He is paid a reported $20m a year to host his show, the O’Reilly Factor, which consistently ranks among the most-watched current affairs programs in US cable TV. He has also authored several bestselling books and memoirs.

He has also been accused of lying in one of his books about being present at the scene when a CIA source, who had allegedly been linked to the assassination of President John F Kennedy, killed himself in 1977.

A spokeswoman for Fox News declined to respond to detailed questions about O’Reilly’s recollections of the Los Angeles riots. She said in a statement that claims casting doubt on his statements were “nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates”.

“Bill O’Reilly has already addressed several claims levelled against him,” the spokeswoman said. “Responding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility. Fox News maintains its staunch support of O’Reilly, who is no stranger to calculated onslaughts.”

O’Reilly has on several occasions referred to a perilous situation he said that he endured while covering the riots in Los Angeles for Inside Edition, the syndicated news magazine show that he fronted between 1989 and 1995.

“They were throwing bricks and stones at us,” O’Reilly told an online interviewer in 2006. “Concrete was raining down on us. The cops saved our butts that time.” Earlier this week, he told the broadcaster Hugh Hewitt: “We were attacked, we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us.”

Inside Edition colleagues from the time who were in Los Angeles with O’Reilly – reporters Bonnie Strauss, Tony Cox and Rick Kirkham, and crew members Theresa McKeown, Bob McCall and Neil Antin – told the Guardian that they did not recall such an incident.

Kirkham, the show’s lead reporter on the riots, was adamant that it did not take place. “It didn’t happen,” he said. “If it did, how come none of the rest of us remember it?”

Tonya Freeman, the head of the show’s library at the time, said: “I honestly don’t recall watching or hearing about that. I believe I probably would have remembered something like that.” Another librarian from the time also said she did not recall the incident. A spokeswoman for Inside Edition declined to comment. Several other senior Inside Edition staffers from the time declined to comment when asked if they recalled O’Reilly’s version of events.

Several members of the team, however, recalled that one afternoon in the days following the peak of the riots, which began on 29 April, the angry resident attacked a camera while O’Reilly was being filmed near the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Pico Boulevard. “It was one person with one rock,” said McCall, the sound man. “Nobody was hit.”

“A man came out of his home,” said Antin, who was operating the camera that was struck. “He picked up a chunk of concrete, and threw it at the camera.” Told of O’Reilly’s description of a bombardment, Antin said: “I don’t think that’s really … No, I mean no, not where we were.”

“There was no concrete,” said McKeown. “There was a single brick”. Kirkham’s response was: “Oh my God. That is a completely fictitious story. Nothing ever rained down on us”. Kirkham, whose van was shown on an episode of the show being shot at during late-night rioting, later made a film for HBO about his struggle with drug addiction.

McKeown, the director of west coast operations, and Kirkham, said O’Reilly had in the moments beforehand irritated residents who were trying to put out fires and clear wreckage. A seventh member of the team, who declined to be quoted for this article, agreed with this characterisation of the incident.

“There were people putting out fires nearby,” said McKeown. “And Bill showed up in his fancy car.” McKeown said at one point, the driver of O’Reilly’s personal car risked causing further offence by exiting the vehicle with a bottle of Windex and polishing the roof.

“The guy was watching us and getting more and more angry,” said McKeown. “Bill was being Bill – complaining ‘people are in my eye line’ – and kind of being very insensitive to the situation.” Kirkham said: “It was just so out of line. He starts barking commands about ‘this isn’t good enough for me’, ‘this isn’t gonna work’, ‘who’s in charge here?’”

The man shouted abuse at O’Reilly and the team, crew members said, and O’Reilly ordered him to shut up. He asked “don’t you know who I am?’,” according to two members of the team.

“The guy lost it,” said McKeown. Enraged, he is said to have leapt on to the team’s flatbed trailer and kicked over a light, before throwing the piece of rubble, which smashed the camera and an autocue screen. Antin said he restrained the man. But O’Reilly then continued taunting him while a producer stood between them. “Come on, you wanna take me? I’ll take you on,” O’Reilly is said to have shouted at him.

McCall said the producer, who is about a foot shorter than O’Reilly, “didn’t have much trouble holding Bill back.” McCall said: “It was a lot more show than anything else on Bill’s part.”

A passing police car was flagged down. After an officer called for backup, several more officers eventually arrived. Crew members recalled that before this, O’Reilly had been hauled inside one of the team’s vehicles by a colleague. “It wasn’t a police rescue,” said Kirkham.

The crew told the police they did not want to press charges and the man was escorted home. Irritated police officers instructed the crew they needed to leave the area. “We had to lay all of our equipment down and just drive out of there with cables dragging,” said Antin. McKeown said that by then, an intimidating crowd had gathered. Other members of the team said the man remained alone.

Antin said an ashen-faced and “visibly shaken” O’Reilly rushed down a nearby alleyway with a secondary cameraman to film replacement shots, which were to be broadcast later as if live.

Asked if O’Reilly’s behaviour was to blame for the incident, McKeown said: “I mean, it would have pissed me off. There didn’t seem to be a sensitivity for what these people were going through. It was more ‘I’m here to do my show’.” Kirkham said O’Reilly had provoked the man, who was “pissed off with O’Reilly’s attitude”.

Antin, however, rejected suggestions that O’Reilly was responsible. “Not at all,” he said. McCall said he did not know. “I can’t say if that’s true or not,” he said. “But I don’t have much respect for Bill, having worked for him during that time. He was a real jackass.”

Asked to respond to the claims from O’Reilly’s former colleagues, and to explain whether O’Reilly had been describing a separate incident when he said “concrete was raining down on us”, the Fox News spokeswoman resent her original emailed statement.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/02/27 13:32:00


 lord_blackfang wrote:
Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.

 Flinty wrote:
The benefit of slate is that its.actually a.rock with rock like properties. The downside is that it's a rock
 
   
Made in us
Secret Force Behind the Rise of the Tau




USA

 Ouze wrote:
As McDonald actually went to Ranger school at least I could sort of believe it was a misstatement, as opposed to a bald faced lie.

On the other hand, he had a whopper just a few weeks beforehand, so....


Special Forces is also based at Fort Bragg along with the 82nd AB.

   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Leerstetten, Germany

 LordofHats wrote:
 Ouze wrote:
As McDonald actually went to Ranger school at least I could sort of believe it was a misstatement, as opposed to a bald faced lie.

On the other hand, he had a whopper just a few weeks beforehand, so....


Special Forces is also based at Fort Bragg along with the 82nd AB.


Lying about being Special Forces seems to be as American as apple pie if my past experiences are anything to go by, unless they do in fact make up more than 25% of the veteran population that comes to my hospital .

But if anybody should expect to get called out on a fib/exaggeration/lie it should be the guy sitting at the big desk with the POTUS during cabinet meetings.
   
Made in us
Stubborn Hammerer





 d-usa wrote:
Everybody that is leaning "left" on this website quickly commented that Williams is an idiot and that he should pay a price. But people leaning "right" are going out of their way to defend "their guy" even though they don't even care about "their guy".



I'm right leaning.

 Scrabb wrote:
I support suspensions for both....


Really, it's just whembly trying to defend O'Reily.


Also, you may be 'misremembering' the details of this thread. Sirlynchymob decided any conversation about journalism should be about Fox's (justifiably) terrible reputation, saying we couldn't punish everyone who lies.

Most people didn't talk about consequences at all.

I don't know if you consider yourself centrist or left leaning but we don't know what you think of the Brian Williams case, because you felt it was a good time to talk about Bush. (correct me if I'm wrong. In which case I apologize for getting rankled)


Well, looks like someone is finally getting into trouble for lying about Iraq.

*ducks*


Bush didn't lie. The worst you could charge him with is being a person who was eager to have an excuse to invade Iraq.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/laurence-h-silberman-the-dangerous-lie-that-bush-lied-1423437950

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/02/27 20:32:21


 
   
Made in us
Last Remaining Whole C'Tan






Pleasant Valley, Iowa

At least one lie exposed beyond a doubt.

The O'Reilly tapes: Phone recordings raise new questions about JFK story
By Tom Kludt @tomkludt

Phone recording debunks O'Reilly's JFK story

One evening in March more than 30 years ago, Gaeton Fonzi received a call from a man whose voice and name are now instantly recognizable.

"Hi Gaeton," the caller said. "Bill O'Reilly."

The year was 1977. O'Reilly, a young television reporter in Dallas, was chasing a story about a figure in the investigation of the JFK assassination who had killed himself in Florida.

He was calling Fonzi, a congressional investigator, to confirm the suicide.

"You hear anything about it?" O'Reilly asked, according to phone recordings provided to CNN by Gaeton's widow, Marie Fonzi.

The phone recordings indicate that O'Reilly learned of the suicide second-hand and was in a different location at the time.

Years later, however, O'Reilly would repeatedly claim to have been at the scene.

In his 2012 book "Killing Kennedy," O'Reilly wrote that he knocked on the door of a South Florida home when suddenly he "heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide" of George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian immigrant who knew Lee Harvey Oswald.

While promoting the book, O'Reilly said on Fox News that he "was about to knock on the door" when de Mohrenschildt "blew his brains out with a shotgun."

The discrepancies were first reported by JFK researcher Jefferson Morley in 2013. His fact-checking didn't get much attention at the time, and the low-quality recordings he posted on his website made it difficult to understand what O'Reilly and Fonzi were saying.

Earlier this week, amid scrutiny about how O'Reilly has recounted some of his journalistic exploits, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America drew new attention to Morley's fact-checking.

CNN then obtained higher-quality recordings from Fonzi's widow.

In the conversations with Fonzi that night in 1977, O'Reilly never once indicated he was anywhere near the scene of the suicide -- much less that he heard the fatal gunshot.

On the call, O'Reilly initially tried to confirm the suicide.

"What's the story?" O'Reilly asked.

"They don't know," Fonzi said.

"Nobody knows," O'Reilly replied.

O'Reilly can also be heard detailing his travel plans. Although he never said where he was calling from, O'Reilly made it clear where he was not.

"I'm coming down there tomorrow," he said. "I'm coming to Florida."

Moments later, he elaborated on his itinerary.

"Now, okay, I'm gonna try to get a night flight out of here, if I can," O'Reilly told Fonzi. "But I might have to go tomorrow morning. Let me see."

Fox News declined to comment on the contradiction in O'Reilly's accounts. The channel referred questions to a spokesperson for Henry Holt, the publisher of O'Reilly's book.

Earlier this week the publisher said "we fully stand behind Bill O'Reilly."

"This one passage is immaterial to the story being told by this terrific book and we have no plans to look into this matter," Henry Holt added.

O'Reilly and Fonzi were apparently on friendly terms. According to Marie Fonzi, her husband hired O'Reilly in the early 1970s to write for Miami Magazine, though she said her husband had no contact with O'Reilly in the years leading up to his death in 2012.

In his 1993 memoir, "The Last Investigation," Gaeton Fonzi recalled those phone conversations on the night of the suicide and described O'Reilly as a "friend." Fonzi's name does not appear in the index of "Killing Kennedy."

Because of that personal connection, Marie Fonzi said she felt conflicted before making the recordings public.

"I always try to do what I think my husband would do, and I sometimes think he would tell me, 'Don't hurt Bill,'" she said. "But I also know my husband was committed to the truth."

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.

 Flinty wrote:
The benefit of slate is that its.actually a.rock with rock like properties. The downside is that it's a rock
 
   
Made in us
Stubborn Hammerer





...and we have no plans to look into this matter," Henry Holt added.


...

That's terrible.
   
Made in us
Last Remaining Whole C'Tan






Pleasant Valley, Iowa

It looks like Fox has started to admit that O'Reilly lied.

Fox News Admits O’Reilly Lied About Encounter with Irish Terrorists
J.K. Trotter

Did Bill O’Reilly personally witness “Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs”? The answer, as you may have guessed, is definitely not. But in this particular case, his long-time employer Fox News is openly admitting to their top anchor’s fabrication.

Last week, the network dismissed a widening array of allegations against O’Reilly as “nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates” and argued that “responding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility.”

But Fox News did respond to questions posed by Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, about a 2013 book in which O’Reilly wrote, “I’ve seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.” In a statement to the Post, the network admits that O’Reilly did not actually see anything of the sort:

Asked about O'Reilly’s statements Friday, a Fox News spokesman said that O’Reilly was not an eyewitness to any bombings or injuries in Northern Ireland. Instead, he was shown photos of bombings by Protestant police officers.
Want to read more about O’Reilly’s dangerous adventures? The book in which he originally claimed to have witnessed the Belfast bombings, Keep It Pithy: Useful Observations in a Tough World: An Essential Collection of Writings By One of the Most Powerful Voices in Media Today, can be purchased on BillOReilly.com for $21.99.


 lord_blackfang wrote:
Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.

 Flinty wrote:
The benefit of slate is that its.actually a.rock with rock like properties. The downside is that it's a rock
 
   
Made in us
Secret Force Behind the Rise of the Tau




USA

Part of me does wonder to what extent this would be true of a lot of reporters. O'Reilly is caught in a cascade of everyone suddenly going through his professed experiences with a fine tooth comb, but I'd bet we'd find similar in the cases of many more media personalities.

Also;

Keep It Pithy: Useful Observations in a Tough World: An Essential Collection of Writings By One of the Most Powerful Voices


I can't help but feel O'Reilly was busy jerking off as he came up with that title...

   
Made in us
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Pleasant Valley, Iowa

I'm not a journalist but I don't think you're supposed to use more than one set of colons in a sentence.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.

 Flinty wrote:
The benefit of slate is that its.actually a.rock with rock like properties. The downside is that it's a rock
 
   
Made in us
Gore-Soaked Lunatic Witchhunter




Seattle

Yes, everyone is going over O'Reilly's career with a fine-tooth comb, because the man has built a career out of (apparently) distorting the truth and making claims to major events that are untrue.

For someone who's supposed to be a journalist, reporting the news, this is Bad. The lies he's propagated have been used to lend him an air of credibility over other journalists... credibility it would seem he is entirely undeserving of.

Perhaps one of the worst aspects of this is that his version of the events he's reported has always placed him significantly in the limelight, rather than the events he's reporting on. In essence, instead of the news, he's been reporting on the Adventures of Bill O'Reilly.

It is best to be a pessimist. You are usually right and, when you're wrong, you're pleasantly surprised. 
   
Made in us
5th God of Chaos! (Ho-hum)





Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

 Ouze wrote:
I'm not a journalist but I don't think you're supposed to use more than one set of colons in a sentence.

LOL!


Live Ork, Be Ork. or D'Ork!


 
   
Made in us
Colonel





This Is Where the Fish Lives

Bill O'Reilly should have consulted this chart before he started writing books about himself:

Spoiler:


Also, he should have taken this test.

 d-usa wrote:
"When the Internet sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending posters that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing strawmen. They're bringing spam. They're trolls. And some, I assume, are good people."
 
   
Made in au
The Dread Evil Lord Varlak





 LordofHats wrote:
Part of me does wonder to what extent this would be true of a lot of reporters.


I think it's probably of most people, to be honest. Most people exaggerate their stories, if only to make them a little more entertaining. We even do this as a natural part of memory - changing stories to make them more streamlined, make the moral clearer. I posted a link about this earlier.

I journalism I think it'd be even more common. Only so many times people can ask you about how your experience in some amazing recent troublespot, before the journalist starts telling a more interesting story than 'when that amazing event broke out I missed it entirely because I because I was in basement of a government building flicking through archives, double checking a witness statement that turned out to be nothing of importance'.

Honestly, the bigger problem is probably our reliance on stories. Even when they're factual, they're inherently misleading.

“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”

Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something. 
   
Made in us
5th God of Chaos! (Ho-hum)





Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

 sebster wrote:
 LordofHats wrote:
Part of me does wonder to what extent this would be true of a lot of reporters.


I think it's probably of most people, to be honest. Most people exaggerate their stories, if only to make them a little more entertaining. We even do this as a natural part of memory - changing stories to make them more streamlined, make the moral clearer. I posted a link about this earlier.

I journalism I think it'd be even more common. Only so many times people can ask you about how your experience in some amazing recent troublespot, before the journalist starts telling a more interesting story than 'when that amazing event broke out I missed it entirely because I because I was in basement of a government building flicking through archives, double checking a witness statement that turned out to be nothing of importance'.

Honestly, the bigger problem is probably our reliance on stories. Even when they're factual, they're inherently misleading.

Can you elaborate on that? It's sounds gooey good... but, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it.

Live Ork, Be Ork. or D'Ork!


 
   
Made in au
The Dread Evil Lord Varlak





 whembly wrote:
Can you elaborate on that? It's sounds gooey good... but, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it.


Basically, we as a species are storytellers. Have a beginning, middle and end, with some kind of little lesson wrapped up in there.

The problem is that these morals often don't work when placed in a greater context. Consider the Titanic, where every schoolkid can tell you that they built a boat that was meant to be unsinkable, and sure enough it sunk, giving us a morality tail about hubris. But if you look at ship building the Titanic really meant nothing, it was one boat that sank, one shipbuilder who was too confident in one hull design. But since the Titanic we've continued to build bigger and more sophisticated, and there's been only four ships sunk by icebergs, and not one casualty since 1959. Seen in the context of what came after, the story changes to one of a single instance of poor decision making and misfortune in the middle of a greater human story of building, better, bigger, faster and stronger.

That latter story is hard to doesn't have a neat narrative, and so it isn't told.


So my kind of vague thoughts in the wake of this whole story is that maybe there wasn't any point to either Williams or O'Reilly's stories, even if they were true. That we don't need more stories, what we need is actual, real data placed in context.

“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”

Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something. 
   
Made in us
Dwarf High King with New Book of Grudges




United States

 sebster wrote:

So my kind of vague thoughts in the wake of this whole story is that maybe there wasn't any point to either Williams or O'Reilly's stories, even if they were true. That we don't need more stories, what we need is actual, real data placed in context.


The point was to sell the story, with the story itself often becoming part of the marketing pitch journalists create to sell themselves and their work. I agree that contextualized data is preferable to the journalism most of the West presently deals with, but no one will watch that sort of thing and video isn't a good medium for it.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. 
   
Made in us
Gore-Soaked Lunatic Witchhunter




Seattle

We shouldn't be "sold" news. From a news reporter, I only want to know "Who", "What", "Where" and "When". I most certainly do not want to be told the journalist's opinion on "Why". That's up to me, as the person viewing the news from an external perspective, to synthesize out of the information provided.

News should not be "exciting" in its presentation. Maybe the events reported on are interesting or exciting (that's why it's news), but I don't need someone who wasn't actually there, who didn't actually see these things, who wasn't actually involved telling me that they were. That has moved out of journalism and into entertainment.

It is best to be a pessimist. You are usually right and, when you're wrong, you're pleasantly surprised. 
   
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 sebster wrote:
 whembly wrote:
Can you elaborate on that? It's sounds gooey good... but, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it.


Basically, we as a species are storytellers. Have a beginning, middle and end, with some kind of little lesson wrapped up in there.

The problem is that these morals often don't work when placed in a greater context. Consider the Titanic, where every schoolkid can tell you that they built a boat that was meant to be unsinkable, and sure enough it sunk, giving us a morality tail about hubris. But if you look at ship building the Titanic really meant nothing, it was one boat that sank, one shipbuilder who was too confident in one hull design. But since the Titanic we've continued to build bigger and more sophisticated, and there's been only four ships sunk by icebergs, and not one casualty since 1959. Seen in the context of what came after, the story changes to one of a single instance of poor decision making and misfortune in the middle of a greater human story of building, better, bigger, faster and stronger.

That latter story is hard to doesn't have a neat narrative, and so it isn't told.


So my kind of vague thoughts in the wake of this whole story is that maybe there wasn't any point to either Williams or O'Reilly's stories, even if they were true. That we don't need more stories, what we need is actual, real data placed in context.

Awesome... I fully understand you and I'm in full agreement with you.

I, too, would prefer stone cold, hard facts. The unfortunate thing is that now, especially cable news, the news is just as often about *facts*, as it is about The Narrative™.

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