Search? Click Here
Join the BUGS Team! Post on the internet along with us to fight White Genocide!

Professional Journalism

Posted by Bob on December 28th, 2005 under Coaching Session


I turned on my TV the first time in days and within two minutes I heard two items that were straight off the journalistic assembly line.

One was a study that showed that women who had strained marriages tended to be sicker. As an extension of that the report revealed that patients who have sexual relationships in hospital tend to be sicker for a longer period.

Nothing was mentioned about the fact that people who are sickly might tend to have worse marriages. Nothing was mentioned about the fact that you do not normallly develop a relationship in a hospital overnight.

You don’t feel good when you are sick. You may be crabbier and harder to live with if you are sick. So there could be a relationship between illness and had marital relations. So if you report that people who have bad relationships are ill and you do not mention that people who are ill may have bad marital relations you are distorting things completely.

The other right-off-the-assembly-line discussion was with the usual full-time paid activist who demands government action and raises money or gets grants for doing it. He wants the FDA to regulate anybody who adds calcium or iron or vitamins to food.

One person I know was living in Eastern Europe “on the economy.” This means he was not shopping in American stores or living in an Amerian hostel or hotel. He informred me that his gums had started bleeding.

I have spent a lot of time living on a lot of economies.

I told him he probably had something like scurvy. I told him to get some AMERICAN multivitamins/minerals.

He did.

That cleared whatever it was up.

The idea of getting anything like scurvy is alien to an American. Our foods are so enriched that even the most wretched of our inhabitants cannot avoid a range of vitamins and minerals that routinely avoid conditions that our ancestors considered common, like goiter and scurvy.

Back in the 1950s the entire medical profession declared that vitamin pills were useless. They declared that one could only get needed chemicals from a “balanced diet.” So it made me a bit nostalgic to hear this guy demanding that everything be regulated by the government if anyone decided to enrich foods.

He said all this evil, uncontrolled enriching keeps our minds off of … guess what? … a balanced diet.

People like this guy and the media should be our guardians, but they are as commercial as anybody they seek to regulate. This guy, like Science in the Public Interest and other groups, are a bunch of pencil-necks who make a living pushing old nostrums and new public regulations.

The “professional journalist” who reported on bad marriages causing ill health just had to throw in the point about the fact that patients who are in hospital who develope relationships with the staff stay sick longer. The idea was that THOSE relationships CAUSED their injuries to to take longer to heal.

But a person whose injury takes longer to heal is more likely to develop a relationship in the hospital.

OK. Pencil necks and Professional journalists have incentives to ignore reality.

But who has the incentive to make the comments I just made?

Let Joe tell me who does.

What I wrote above takes one minute of watching TV and my writing it down for half an hour.

But who is going to PUBLISH it?

How can it compete with THIS:

“A one-year study by the Harvard Institute on Health Through Counseling shows that people who have bad marriages tend to be more ill. Professor Bugenboogle said that this would seem to indicate that bad marriages CAUSE ill health.”

Here you have a one-year study at enormous public expense and PhDs at public expense.

This is news.

If it is a long, long study by a name outfit it is news. And if it’s sexy stuff it hits the media.

And, as outlined above and I could give examples all the day long, ONLY the sexy angle gets the media attention.

Bad marriages CAUSE ill health is a news hook. In fact, everybody can testify that they felt bad throughout a bad divorce.

This is a sexy story.

“Greedy corporations are destroying a balanced diet!” is NEWS. You can do a fund-raiser on that one.

You can’t do a fund-raiser on common sense. You cannot get attention to common sense.

Common sense is not sexy.

One of the sexiest stories the Professional Journalists love to tell is how those who are NOT Professional Journalists are just selling papers with sensationalism. Professional Journalists, on the other hand, weigh the studies carefully and avoid such distortion.

Actually Professional Journalists distort every story they tell, and not just for commercial purposes. The news is a stream of completely illogical statements designed to get the point across that will get published. If you don’t learn to do that, you will not last as a Professional Journalist.

Since the end of local independent newspapers Professional Journalism is as mass-produced as anything else.

The Professional Journalist at Voice of America that I worked with was as much a part of an assembly-line machine as a worker on an auto assembly line. He was measured by his ability to come up with the same story as other jounralists, but preferably quicker.

And now to a really heretical thought:

Why should mass media and huge newspaper chains be allowed to run editorials? General Motors can’t run a political editorial without being subject to government restrictions. Even if they could do it, the big other big corporations couldn’t write off their their editorialists’ pay as business expenses as a normal part of business expenses.

Only one mass-production big business is allowed to write off its political expenses.

Common sense used to come from the press. That is why the Founding Fathers protected them. But there is no relationship between the press they lived with and the giant businesses that are the media today.

Why is the Big Business of Media allowd to have open political opinions, and write them off as business expences, but other giant corporations can’t?

Try getting THAT idea published.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
  1. #1 by joe rorke on 12/29/2005 - 2:06 am

    The person who has the incentive to make the comments that you just made is a person who wants the truth exposed. I have no more respect for the Corporate Media than I do for Respectable Conservatives. I’m finished with them. There’s nothing heretical about your question concerning the Corporate Media. If there’s any heresy involved, I don’t recognize it. It’s a great question you’re asking there, Bob. They have the freedom to express their opinion to the masses on a daily basis. There opinions, for the most part, are the opinions of jackasses. They will talk about anything except the things that really matter. How many of your ideas have they discussed? That’s what I thought.

  2. #2 by Elizabeth on 12/30/2005 - 12:42 pm

    Finally! The great obesity hysteria is hitting the front pages as hysteria.
    I don’t deny that obesity is a problem — I see people all the time who
    dwarf me [I’ve *never* been “diminutive”!] — but treating the BMI (body
    mass index) as holy gospel will get the problem laughed out of
    public attention. (According the BMI, our President, who is one
    of these wiry athletes, is *fat*!) Being at one *extreme* or the other
    is indeed a recipe for disaster.

    One of the main reasons I’m in grad school is that I have found out
    the hard way that it’s very hard to get listened to or published
    in my field (history) without one. Or gainfully employed. (I spent
    plenty of years working my tail off at low status, lower pay
    jobs.)

You must be logged in to post a comment.