They feed us garbage and we get sick...
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...that's pretty much my take on our irresponsible media but before I explain, let me digress for a moment.
Back on June 15th The Melbourne Age posted an article by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd titled "Bloggers, they're just trying to put the 'me' in media". In her article she poo-poo'd the stereotypical Blackberry carrying blogger saying that they did not have the credentials to report sensibly on the matters of today. You see, Maureen had just attended a blogger convention in Vegas and was obviously feeling a little low on self-esteem that day having been faced with the fact that there are other people out there prepared to talk about current events and news. I imagine that Maureen must have felt a lot less special as she sat writing her poisonous article against the blogging community.
So why do I have such a lack of empathy for Maureen and her fellow journo's? It's because I have a very low opinion of our mainstream news reporters and the garbage that they feed us through newspapers and the television. These people have repeatedly made poor and opportunistic reporting choices, and they are now faced with the prospect of living their days in a crumbling empire competing with 16 year old, cigarette smoking teenagers who blog their own views of today's events from within their own living rooms and apartments. Maureen, I wish that I could advise you not to waste your efforts in talking down the blogging community but instead take the time to talk to your colleagues about cleaning up your own patch. It's respected people in the industry such as yourself who have the power to get big media back on track and help make sure that we can rely on them for the truth and not just whatever mush they can produce to fill time and sell ads. Maureen, take a risk... raise the bar, don't waste your time trying to push people below a bar that is already way too low.
OK, that was a big rant against mainstream media and it follows on from yesterday's blog post where I talked about the media's treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian stuff. After posting that article I was chatting to Roy Osherove (who is the only Israeli guy that I know) and he pointed me at an amazing video which gives a very different slant on the images that we get shown every day. Here is the link to a blog entry in which Roy links to a video showing another view of life in the "war-torn" region:
http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2006/06/18/Pallywood.aspx
Watch that video and then you tell me... what do you think of our media?
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Pallywood
posted by
Dave Moyle
on
7/4/2006 8:48:00 AM
:
Watched it, loved it, passed it on.
Confirms many years of suspicion.