Two things that made me just stop watching national news:
The facts are pre-determined.
I got up early one morning, and not finding a movie I liked, I went over to
FAUX News for their
"Fox & Fiends", basically it's three idiots on a couch, filing air space between commercials.
One of them had just finished a story, and two of them were engaged in the usual "spontaneous banter" they do before going to a commercial. It basically is intended to look like they've a few seconds to kill and are just filling, off the cuff.
So there sat one of them going on with,
"Well what I think about it is..." and the other one doing something like,
"Oh you're right! I think that..."
My jaw dropped, and I had to put down my coffee. I couldn't believe what I was seeing! Here were two major news figures, going on with "what I think..." sentences, and their eyes were going back, and forth!
They were reading it all off teleprompters!
Now, understand that I had already decided neither one of them had a brain, or a thought between them, I was just floored by the fact thier boss didn't either. Not only that, they considered their audience so dumb they didn't think anyone would notice that they were reading.
T'was the last time I watched TV news for anything other than local fire coverage.
The facts are pre-determined.
This next item is from a piece
by Gore Vidal, about his encounter with
ABC News;I sat on an uncomfortable chair, facing a camera. Generators hummed amid the delphiniums. Good Morning America was first. I had been told that Diane Sawyer would be questioning me from New York, but ABC has a McVeigh “expert,” one Charles Gibson, and he would do the honors.
Our interview would be something like four minutes. Yes, I was to be interviewed "In Depth". This means that only every other question starts with “Now, tell us, briefly … ” Dutifully, I told, briefly, how it was that McVeigh, whom I had never met, happened to invite me to be one of the five chosen witnesses to his execution.
Live on television, I mentioned the unmentionable word “why,” followed by the atomic trigger word “Waco.” Charles Gibson, 3,500 miles away, began to hyperventilate. “Now, wait a minute … ” he interrupted. But I talked through him. Suddenly I heard him say, “We’re having trouble with the audio.” Then he pulled the plug that linked ABC and me.
The soundman beside me shook his head. “Audio was working perfectly. He just cut you off.” So, in addition to the governmental shredding of Amendments 4, 5, 6, 8, and 14, Mr. Gibson switched off the journalists’ sacred First.
Why? Like so many of his interchangeable TV colleagues, he is in place to tell the viewers that former senator John Danforth had just concluded a 14-month investigation of the F.B.I. that cleared the bureau of any wrongdoing at Waco.
The facts are pre-determined.
Turn it off!