Thursday, January 27, 2011

It's the story...

There's an old saying in the newspaper business, its the story people remember, never the retraction, or correction. Last week some nutjob went on the radio and said "I've spoken to the Governor of Hawaii, and he said there is no birth certificate for Obama".

Except he didn't. 

He's sorry he misspoke. But that's not the important thing here. This is the kind of shit we are seeing more and more of from the Right. They will say outright lies with conviction. They will ignore facts, twist statistics make insane connections and suppositions. And when someone calls them on their bullshit they might MIGHT mumble something about "maybe you misunderstood what we were saying".  It's tiresome.

2 comments:

Ed Dale said...

Agreed it is tiresome, even worse because the issue of a birth certificate, or where he was born, or who his father was, does NOT matter. He was the child of a citizen, so is a citizen of the US.

Reyhan said...

What actually bothers me was the court case (I can't quite remember the precedent) that effectively established that news agencies in the US have no obligation to tell the truth.

A few people tried to sue Rupert Murdoch's media empire using the Whistleblower statute, and it was found that Whistleblower did not apply because no law was being broken. Whoops.

It brings up the point - can (and should!) we reasonably expect news agencies to tell us the truth?