If you’re only getting your news from TV, you’re not getting any News; 90% of what you are getting is grey propaganda. It started with Clinton, and Bush has made it into a fine art.



Video news releases - SourceWatch

shygrneyzs

A variety of sources. Television being one, but not even at the top. Newspapers, radio, online newspapers, and magazine and newsletters. Television used to be a trusted medium but I think that went out when Walter Cronkite retired.

Dark_crow

I’m back to print only after doing some research on the subject of video news releases.

From what I can make of it OUR HERO has used mock news releases for misleading the average citizen.

nicespringgirl

Still, I don't trust all the news.
I get them onFortune, Business Week, and Economist sometimes. I am more of a business news person.
General news, I get from USA today, internet or the daily show.
What's new is, I start looking at what you guys writing here.

Dark_crow

I actually get almost all my news from the internet, and have done do for the past 8 or so years. I have several different live news feeds on my browser, so it’s fairly easy to check them; from art to economics, to headline news. I also have several of the radical [From both the left and the right.] news sites bookmarked.

I’m not really interested, most of the time, in politics except from a philosophical viewpoint. It simply doesn’t matter to me, from a pragmatic standpoint, who wins or loses, or who’s running the country. I’m more interested in the arguments than in the subject matter; excluding my silly moments of self-entertainment.

ETWolverine

Oh, it goes back a lot further than that. Yellow journalism, where news agencies are used to MAKE the news instead of REPORT the news (and that is what this is) dates back to the 1800s.

FDR used yellow journalism quite well to push for his New Deal agenda, and then to get the public behind the war effort.

LBJ made up stories about the Vietnam conflict out of whole cloth in order to justify the increased war effort in Vietnam. On the other side, guys like John Kerry made up stories about the war crimes of US military servicemen in Vietnam out of whole cloth in order to justify his anti-war movement. Both were reported as "fact" by newspapers with political agendas.

The Hearst family were experts at yellow jounalism. So, in his own way, is Rupert Murdock. All news agencies print "facts" with a particular spin that matches their political leanings, and use shoddy corroboration techniques to verify information that suits their needs.

So, this practice predates Bush, Clinton and every other president of the 20th and 21st centuries. It has always existed, but it became the "norm" in the 19th century.

Has Bush mastered the art? Given that in 2004 he held a prime-time press briefing on Social Security, and given that EVERY SINGLE MEDIA OUTLET IN THE USA COMPLETELY IGNORED IT, I would say that the arguments that Bush has mastered the use of media to push a political agenda is somewhat lacking. He is actually no better or worse at it than any other president in history.

As for my news sources, they are many and varied. But I tend to go to the sources of the information in order to get it in context. If a speech is quoted in the news, I read the entire speech. If statistics are cited, I look at the source of the statistics. If poll numbers are cited, I read the original poll in full. I don't rely on others to spoon-feed me infomation. I do my own research.

Elliot

excon

Hello:

I get my news from the Wolverine. He knows everything. Then I take the exact opposite view.

excon

nicespringgirl

That's true!

ETWolverine

And that explains why you are always wrong.

Elliot

Dark_crow

Elliot

There is a big difference between Yellow journalism and Video news releases; I’m surprised going to the source didn’t fetch you the distinction.

It seems you again miss distinctions between one object and another; Yellow journalism is not he same as Video news releases.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

"White House News Forgeries Widespread"