Questioninggeller
Illuminator
- Joined
- May 11, 2002
- Messages
- 3,048
I'm sorry EMM, but trust is not so important as entertainment. The Fourth Estate runs on a thing called Situational Ethics. If a story will sell papers, that's great! If an article sells papers, but offends a major advertiser who then threatens to pull it's sponsorship, the paper is likely to tone down it's rhetoric. If a story offends some Really Powerful People, then a paper is likely to drop the story entirely.
The same goes for broadcast journalism; thus the "Dan Rather vs. the Whitehouse" incident. Guess who won that battle?
The best bet is to draw from several independent news sources, and then draw your own conclusions. Tune in to VOA, the BBC, and even Radio Moscow and Radio Peking for a wider range of views on the same story, and then make an informed choice as to what the truth is.
Let's not turn this thread into a debate about ethics and lies in newspapers.
I think his point was there is little reason to think that the mother of a dying child (or the reporter) would lie in a newspaper regarding a firefighter's disappearance 5 days after 9/11.
