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Very often the media will catch on to a story and through the act of hype transform the reality into a well-narrated fiction. Instead of being impartial observers who inform, the media will often engage in hyperbole distorting the image presented. This has happened several times before in the past.
There was the famous incident of an American trash-ship which could not find an American city to dump its load. The media spent months reporting about the wandering ship and how this was a new problem in America. That there was too much trash in the country and not enough places to dump. The media just reported what they saw prima facie. It was a nice story line, why bother with real information. This story was entirely bogus. America has more than ample room place trash, which is often condensed and burned. There are many other past examples, and now we can one more to that.
Recently, Oprah and subsequently NBC Evening News reported about a supposedly new shantytown in the Californian state capital of Sacramento. The story was presented as a modern day Hooverville - shantytowns during the Great Depression. It was a nice - in a positive use of the word - story for the evening news. The press had already been making comparisons between today’s economic crisis and the Great Depression, why not offer parallels like a shantytown? A sign of the times, NBC News stated. Viewers were made to believe that the entire site of homeless persons was a new enclave due to the foreclosures affecting the country. CNN also reported on the area conveying the same message.
It attracted national attention. The mayor of Sacramento and the governor of California both visited the site. Because of the national attention, the radius of homelessness was actually cleaned up with those needing a home were given shelter or a low-rent apartment. NBC News reported on the relocation, and in doing so once again made the area appear as if it were a modern day Hooverville that the government has attended to.
A tragedy such homelessness is, but this was just another case of media hype that distorted the reality. In actuality, this was no modern day shantytown. Nor was it new. Homeless people had been living in that area for years. Most of them were people mentally abused or drug users, or both. They lived in the area for a decade. The media and state politicians only noticed such dire poverty and homelessness when a person or two settled there due to a foreclosure. The media spoke to one or two people newly there due to a foreclosure and made it appear as if the entire area was populated with people like them, and as if they were coming in every day. That image was false.
It is such favoring of an emotional story line over factual evidence that undermines trust and confidence in the media, no wonder it is one of the least respected institutions in American life.
Besides media laziness and ineptitude, what is also striking about his is that as stated above the press and politicians seem to have selective concern for the homeless. As The Economist noted, “For some reason, America notices only when they’re on Oprah, or from the middle class.”
Source: The Hooverville that wasn’t.
RSS 
How many times do you turn to cable news and rather then stating facts they create a teaser ”Will tell you if an earthquake has struck San Francisco right after tis break” Then after the break nothing about San Francisco except we’ll ell you next if the was an earthquake. This is interrupted for live coverage of a car hitting a garbage can causing garbage everywhere. The a news flash that there is a rumor in London that Madonna has changed her hair color. And on and on.
In the 1970’s The New York Times and The Washington Post fought for the ”Publics Right To Know”. Now they fight to withhold the truth from the public. The LA Times owned by the Tribune Corp. heavily influenced by the Ayers family refused to release a type of a candidate for President of the USA denouncing basic American principals and extolling praise on terrorism. The San Francisco Chronicle refused to release a taped interview with Obama in which he declared that his environmental policy of Cap and Trade would cause utility prices to skyrocket and force mas conservation of energy resources and the use of fossil fuels.
During Nam stories were ”spiked” by military censors preventing these stories from being told to the public.
today the media bias of an isolated elite of shared class values and distorted perception of the reality of thruth based on myths and propagandistic lies has led us to military, financial, ethical, sociological, political and perhaps even the treat of existential crises to our nation and civilization.
Corporate interests have stolen the media and Western Civilization. The best example the Middle East.
The history presented today is not based on fact but rather a big lie and non reporting of facts. Israel has become the new Jew. The demoniac nation of racism, expansionism and war. Canaan, Judea, The Holy Land, Israel are now referred to as Palestine going back to 3000BCE when that term didn’t exist. Even when Hadrian renamed Judea, Syria Palestrina the name never replaced the true names. The Christian New Testament never mentions Palestine only The Holy Land of Israel. The Koran never mentions Israel or Jerusalem. However it does refer to the Holy Land divinely assigned to the People of Israel.(Sura V:12, 20-21). As to ” Israeli Occupation of Palestinian territory” that is a total fabrication. Lord Caradon the British Ambassador to the UN and US Amb. Justice Arther Goldberg both wrote extensively on the meaning of Res 242. Israel was to withdraw to new secure borders after negotiating a comprehensive peace with all of it’s Arab enemies. The 1967 borders or green line were not recognized as permanent in that they were not negotiated to in a peace treaty rather they were armistice lines of a cease fire. The is no mention of a Palestinian state or people. Israel was the victim of a war of aggression. Israel pleaded with King Hussein not to enter the war but without provocation Jordan shelled West Jerusalem. In 1964 the PLO in it’s Charter relinquished any claim to sovereignty over the West Bank or Jerusalem. Those are the true historical facts. Today they have been throw in the garbage bin of an Orwellian world of propagandistic myths, lies, brainwashing and disinformation.
N Korea will soon have have nuclear devices to sell to terrorists. The Europeans are ignoring trade sanctions against Iran selling it the means to destroy Europe as the US sold Japan the raw materials used against us in WWII.
We live in a world of reality relativity that is destabilizing the world’s institutions and setting the stage for potential miscalculations like those that led to WWI.
The media has it’s own selfish distorted perception of reality that it reports as truth to the public. The very fabric of this nations foundation on the Liberalism expressed in The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and Common Law have brought this nation to an existential crises of values, honesty, justioce and the corruption of our governmental institutions at every level and every branch.
The media reinforces the dissolution of the social contract and the degeneration of profession ethics, core values, best practices leaving a public adrift in a world of deception and greed with no safety net to protect the elimination of our middle class and the transition to an corporatism when power rests in private and public bureaucracies and a illusionary democratic government headed by incompetent corporate owned politicians rule this once great experiment in democracy. We have our first AstroTurfed President created by a propagandistic media.
...That’s the case everywhere.