As IF Times

Source: Media graveyard: Daily newspapers down nearly 80%, hard news ‘in danger’ | Washington Examiner

We’ve touched on this before, “Headlines R News” and it’s timely that this topic has come up again.  Certainly it’s no surprise to those who scour news feeds on a regular basis.  Many (but not all) know that when they see a headline from certain particular news outlets,  there will most certainly be spin to the actual story.  To name the most obvious ones, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and yes, even NPR.  We also know that the old line TV networks such as ABC, CBS and certainly NBC are also tainted when it comes to giving an objective story.  CNN is long past its halcyon days as an objective news source and has moved to insert more entertainment based programming in their schedule.

As the article states, the emergence of opinion based sites have mushroomed in the wake of the decline of hard news outlets and that success has caused much cross outlet sharing of stories so that it becomes increasingly difficult to discern fact from opinion laced skew.  It’s an easy bet that many younger people today think that The Huffington Post is a news site.  There was a disturbing revelation a while ago that many considered Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show as a news source.

It’s been my opinion that the ubiquity of smartphones has been the dynamic which has shifted the way news is consumed.  That and of course, social media.  Because screens are small and attention spans short, people do not delve into the fabric of a story, defaulting instead to scanning the headline and perhaps a few follow on sentences.  The more sensationalist the headline (or controversial) the more likely that the story gets read further. So why buy an entire newspaper when you get the gist of a story within a few headlines?  Matt Drudge is the most successful entrepreneur to exploit this technique.

Another big reason for the demise of hard news companies is…just what is hard news anymore? We’ve earlier opined that many old line companies put out biased reportage, so how does anyone determine what’s news and what’s spin?  It’s seldom that you get served the main course of a news item without a healthy side order of political bias.  Classic journalism wisdom posits that dog bites man stories don’t sell whereas man bites dog stories do.  Now, we are given myriad psycho babble reasons for why the man bit the dog, the racial undertones, the consequence to society at large and of course the possible political consequences.

My most discussed example, because it’s the most egregious, is the coverage of the ever evolving topic of Global warming.  All kinds of activities are purportedly contributors to global warming and all kinds of crazed schemes are put forth in the premise of stopping its effects.  I’m surprised no one has suggested putting up curtains or venetian blinds to block some of the sun’s rays.  Only recently are we beginning to hear some voices that offer lucid skepticism of the cartloads of claims associated with the charade.  For the most part though, news outlets treat global warming the same way as Al Gore characterizes gravity, it just is.

So the small screen and social media have both contributed to the demise of hard reportage. It’s quite possible that in time, some novel news organization can recapture the public’s confidence in reportage.  Meanwhile, we expect that much of what passes for news will continue to be biased, vapid and ignored.  As long as people judge the veracity of an event by the number of likes on Facebook, or by the number of twitter followers, it only gets worse.

Source: Caddie Steve Williams defends using “slave” to describe working for Tiger

While it may appear that Williams’ use of the word ‘slave’ is an international scandal, in fact only about 14 people care and those are likely the friends of this article’s author.

It’s not clear from the article exactly who was offended by the use of the ‘s’ word. If the author is to be believed, the world is aghast at the horrific use of this word and surely a groundswell of anger will rise forcing Williams’ firing as a caddie.  He implies that the populace will denounce Williams as if he were Charlie Hebdo depicting Mohammed.  While he may get sympathetic audience in certain circles, oh let’s say at the University of Missouri, most readers will likely just move on to the fantasy football stats.

As rabidly fanatical as Muslim zealots may be, their outrage is mostly confined to anything which they feel is an insulting depiction of their prophet Mohammed.  Feel free to disparage their lifestyle, treatment of women or personal proclivities, but don’t make fun of the Prophet.

The PC zealots however have a much broader net of unacceptable words, phrases and expressions and it keeps expanding.  Williams’ use of the ‘s’ word was an innocuous description of how he felt about his role with Tiger, but unbeknownst to him, that word is on the growing list of offensive adjectives and nouns.  At the very least, someone should publish a complete guide to offensive words; call it the Snowflake dictionary.  They can publish it and distribute copies so that like minded bearded people can gather in groups and shake it at offenders while chanting “death to America”.  Ok, well not everyone needs a beard.

You can’t make this stuff up.  Only in the mentality of the Orwellian named Progressive mindset can you justify the restrictions of the use of language.  As this tidal wave of PC moves forward, future generations will be robbed of some very colorful descriptions of things as they are banished by the word police.  Gone will be Chinese fire drill, Russian roulette, Irish spring, Greek wedding, gypped, Tasmanian devil, French kiss.  Those are obvious, and in fact, we’ve already been conditioned to use ‘chairperson’, ‘significant other’ and ‘partner’.  We’ve already done away with fat, crazy and stupid, especially if it applies to one person.

But what about “healthy” because it offends disabled people; hard worker because it’s offensive to slaves; “winner” because it’s offensive to losers; and I’m not making this stuff up,  ‘girl’ .  The word ‘dumb’ is rapidly on its way out even though most people’s use of it has nothing to do congenital deficiency.  We expect that Disney will have to go back and reshoot all their cartoon elephant programming.

Not known to most people is the fact that the expression “politically correct” was first invoked by…Mao Tse Tung, he of the re-education camp fame.   That should tell you all you need about the nature of the ideology pushed upon us today.