Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for June 23, 2023

Some people are colossal simpletons, and that’s not news.

“A source said…”

It is working for congress and a lot of the people who are currently running for president of the USA.

With budget cuts, some newspapers are skipping some of those steps.

tower of Babel (ala the intwrmets) strikes again!

Even the New York Times has succumbed to the temptation to skip most of that process.

I read “The Week”, seems to be somewhat balanced and they seem to have their facts

Newsroom at the Seattle Times has been seriously cut back. They still do the occasional investigative report, but less frequently than before.

Twits, through and through

I alway try to quote experts from the History channel.

There was a time that if the reporter didn’t verify his sources, he would be ridiculed or fired.

Trust, but verify.

Amazing how it relates to Roland Hedley’s course on yesterday’s (and today’s) Doonesbury (from 1998 though): https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2023/06/22

All those steps the goat listed take time and money. It also takes patience and discipline from the public to appreciate news that reflects reality. It’s far easier to consume sensational claims (with no basis in reality ) from the social media.

“experts say it may be…”

News agencies tweet all the time so…

I hate how they quote movie stars as if they are authorities on anything!

What decade does Pastis lives in that he thinks newspapers still do any of this?

The information superhighway turned out to be all manure trucks and billboards.

Witnesses? Nowadays, they just interview other journalists. Or an “expert” – no credentials, just a “science expert,” or “economy expert….”

Thirty-seven percent of Americans think . . . .

The term “fact-checked” doesn’t have the weight it used to. Nobody can be trusted, especially those who tell you stuff that you don’t want to hear.

Professional journalists making up isht from nothing isn’t exactly new.

Looks like someone’s been brainwashed. The news media has been doing this for decades. Do they not teach about Yellow Journalism in History classes anymore? You know the time the US got involved in a war due to fake news. What about Walter Kronkite’s defeatist take on the Tet Offensive, a battle the US actually won, but Kronkite made it seem like we lost. For something a bit newer, look to the coverage about the 2000 election saying George Bush stole the election, only to have the truth come out and be buried when several news organizations bought Florida’s ballots and did a re-count themselves, finding only 3 out of 8 scenarios came out with Bush losing, a full recount of the state’s ballots, the REAL definitive way to know how Florida voted came out in Bush’s favor as well as 5 other scenarios. Still I hear media personalities saying that Bush stole the election. And people wonder why many people believe the media has no credibility?

I also like the “doctors recommend” ads.

Nobody cares what these clowns do or don’t do anymore

In the past, “yellow journalism” carried a modicum shame. Now, no one cares as long as it makes money.

The internet is a powerful and dangerous thing. What you write can stay there for a long time.

LOL… This morning The Count saw a story on line about Hunter Biden attending a “White House Dinner at the White Hous”. As an afterthought, The Count hopes they counted the silverware after he left.

….a high, White Horse souse said today…

And all verified too.

Rat has no clue.

Whatever it is, it’s amazing.

Twitter, the monetized corporate gossip machine. How I miss tabloid papers!

Yet, despite their modern ‘just play a hunch that fits our narratives’ commitment, CNN still zooms down a greased left turn track down hill; too much competition on that side of the road, I guess.

This is why I don’t watch the news. It’s full of lies and propaganda.

I also don’t care.

Rat got 56,001 more reTweets than he deserved!

So true.

Goat must be recounting life in the 1950s and before, except that thing with Nixon.

Thank goodness, we need someone to tell us what we saw ,shown live, wasn’t really what we saw, and what the politicians wsaid isn’t what we heard.

If you want to know what journalism used to be, and should be, read All the President’s Men. It is not just about Watergate, but about the way the story was uncovered. Writers and editors worked together to find facts, verify sources and discover the truth. Nothing was reported that couldn’t be independently verified.

Fact checking – I seem to remember something like that years ago…

Rat has always been GOP.

They left out the most important part of the process: Deciding whether the story is “newsworthy” or not.

News bias is carried out far more by the decisions to focus on some events and ignore others. In other cases, it’s dependent upon whether an “official” line—from a government, corporation, etc, is accepted or viewed skeptically (whether Trump colluded with Russia in a campaign, or whether a certain lab in Wuhan and “patient zeros” there was the source of a virus or not, for example). Too often, a whole lot of “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!!!” is part of what what self-labels itself “journalism.”

That’s an opinion piece. They can be much more salacious and therefore much more popular.

Hay! Steph!, wake up, wake up, your dreaming!!

Progress my rat’s patootie.

You don’t even need to have a hunch. You can just make something up knowing it’s false and post it anyway.

It’s something alright.

Elon Musk sank the Titanic. Don’t believe me? You’re reading the wrong Tweets.

Goat is thinking ‘This ain’t progress’.

My personal favorite is the often-quoted “expert”. Of course, we’re never told what makes him an expert.

Rat’s words of wisdom get 56000 retweets in just minutes, sources say!

Consider that Pig is the “source”….

God forbid! The horrors of social media.

And thus, right-wing populism flourished.

I don’t always follow hunches, but when I do I’m rarely wrong. But I don’t post it and call it news.