The Illusion Of Television & Newspaper News

From the NY Times, August 28, 2006--but use the SF Chronicle reprinting, as they don't charge you up the ying-yang after 14 days--are some interesting admissions as to how what you see on television is an illusion, and that the networks are frequently too gutless to turn their cameras from the script and show reality. Consider also that even the NY Times, the supposed bastion of freedom of the press, buries critical facts deep in their articles just like Pravda and Izvestia in the 1960's USSR, and spins the "news" like the White House Press Office:


Paragraph 7 of the article--note how even the NY Times fears offending Reich Chancellor Bu$h:

In an event with echoes of his prime-time speech in Jackson Square in New Orleans last September, Bush spoke Monday in a working-class neighborhood in Biloxi against a backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. But just a few feet away, outside the scene captured by the camera, stood gutted houses with wires dangling from ceilings. A tattered piece of crime-scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Bush spoke. A toilet sat on its side in the grass.


Work your way down to Paragraph 12 of the article, and this glimmer of truth emerges:

Nearby, along the ocean, ravaged antebellum homes and churches dotted the waterfront. The beach, stretching from Gulfport to Biloxi, was deserted. Debris hung from trees, and motels stood shuttered. Blue tarpaulins still patched the roofs of most dwellings. Written in green spray paint on a fence around a home in Biloxi was: "You loot, I shoot."


Three more down, Paragraph 15, is this incredible line. "Perception"??? Uh, folks, it's a stark raving reality. "Perception" is a term straight out of Goebbels, er, Rove, Inc.:

Images of a remote president playing guitar on a military base, then later peering out the window of Air Force One as it flew over the devastation helped fuel the perception that Bush failed to respond adequately to the storm.



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