Posted by
crosspatch on Saturday, December 16, 2006 10:50:25 PM
Now that 2006 has nearly come to a close, I wanted to take a moment to share what I think has been the most important story of the year. That would be the major wire services being caught red-handed falsifying the news. From the wire services running doctored and staged news photos, false captioning, to publishing of news reports of deliberately inflated casualty counts and in some cases events that never happened, the media has been exposed due to people questioning what we are being fed. The Internet has allowed us to access expertise of millions of other people. What one person might have noticed in the past can now be shared and verified by a concerned public in seconds.
When the wire services published photos of the same person before several different buildings in pictures transmitted days apart, people noticed. When pictures contained obvious doctoring to make the pictures appear worse than they really were, people noticed. When it became obvious to some that pictures were being staged, they called attention, others looked, more dug through past photos and the fraud was brought to light.
I was greatly saddened by the death of our journalistic ethic in this country until I realized that it hasn't died, it has simply moved. Where the major media outlets are now engaged in partisan political propaganda, the real ethical reporting seems to have moved to the blogs. People are calling the major media on their fabrications. They are making the obvious propaganda transparent.
I agree with Time magazine's selection of Person Of The Year.
Well done, everyone. Now let's get back to work!