Conal Hanna is terribly hurt at the discovery that what people tell journalists is sometimes – gasp – not the truth:
Where do we go from here? Can journalists take anyone at face value anymore? Do we need to verify every eyewitness we speak to? What do you think?
That’s the sort of thing my mate Plod, a Victorian police member, has also been puzzled by recently. Do police really need to check everything they’re told? Can’t they just take an accusation at face value? Why do they need to verify evidence? Why would a criminal tell them something that wasn’t true?
What is wrong with people today?
Somebody save Conal from Ricky’s diabolical “lying” invention.
I fear for us all in this scary new world.
1 response so far ↓
SB // 8 July, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Journalism is dead. Thanks to the unctuous need of journalist to impose their views on the story, almost all reportage is opinion.
Now people do not experience straight reportage of the facts. They tune to talkback radio if they want a raging populist view of the world, or to the ABC if they want the smug elitist take on things.
The act of acquiring information is now more an exercise in reinforcing ones prejudices. This represents a triumph of the post-modernists. Concepts such as truth and accuracy have been discredited.
I am surprised that journalists even care that people lie to them, so long as they can spin the appropriate narrative around the story.
Another factor in the equation is that people are less willing to pay for journalists to serve up their stinking biased crap when it can be had for free. Soon there will only be organs of the state like Pravda, the ABC and the BBC, or public radio where wanking ideologues vigorously mount their favourite hobby-horses.
No wonder piss-ant bloggers have such a wide audience – their ramblings are free to read, and they offer all shades of political opinion. The education system has ensured that most people neither know nor care that most bloggers are semi-literate fools (present company excluded of course).