Who said Williams is the only liar?

            I was reading a nationally syndicated author intone seriously that conservatives only believe the media is lying because Spiro Agnew once attacked the media.  Since then all conservatives have been deranged.  I remember that era.  But it wasn’t Agnew that did it for me.  I was working for the Weather Bureau which had just been renamed NOAA.  We had a teletype in the corner which was the 1970 equivalent of the internet—the only thing that would give up to the minute news.  Every night before I went home, I’d look at the weather forecasts.  Then half an hour later would watch the TV weather forecaster.  Amazingly, they would often not give the forecasts from NOAA, their only source for those forecasts.  (Remember, computers with less power than your iphone were the size of a large commercial building in the1970s.)  What they would often broadcast was an exaggeration of any unusual condition.  In other words, they sensationalized with a lie.  An inch of snow became half a foot perhaps.  Thus, when the forecasted disaster didn’t occur, people would say, “Whew! good thing that didn’t happen!” and promptly forget the missed forecast.  But if the weather actually became a disaster and everyone said, “How do I get this partly cloudy off my car?” another person might say, “well, you should have watched channel 15.  They predicted all this!” Channel 15 gained viewers. 

            The psychology that people remember disastrous predictions when they come true, but forget them when they don’t is a well-founded principle of psychological self-defense.  The forecasters used this consistently. 

            Another happening in my life of the early seventies was graduate school.  As a Graduate Teaching Assistant, I taught physics labs and graded papers.  The Journalism majors were infamous for unteachability.  You’d ask students to boil water and graph the temperatures.  Most students could do this and realize an obvious fact.  The temperature rises until it reaches 212 degrees at which point the increase stops as energy is used to turn the water turn to steam.  The journalists would often launch into all sorts of atomic  and chemical explanations which made no sense at all.  (Don’t make a bunch of physics grad students angry by trying to snow them about atomic physics!) We laughed that we wanted to get a big BULLSPIT stamp made to stamp all such papers. This would save us the chore of long, handwritten explanations about why the student was full of baloney.  (Okay, so I lied about the “P” in the stamp.)  Therein is the skill of journalists.  They may have fact A and fact B but in between they just make a bunch of good-sounding stuff up.  Else, in a perplexing and unexplained world, they have little to publish.  Their skill and style is to convince the reader or listener of their expertise and thorough research.

            In the old days of journalism, prior to the seventies, editors demanded that reporters ascertain more facts.  The public demanded truth in what they read and it was horribly embarrassing for a newspaper to get caught in a lie.  In those days, many reporters were not educated people.  These Mike Ryoko types just pounded the streets and interviewed incessantly until they had a story.  If you wrote simply from your feelings , not facts, that was for the Opinion page, not the front page. (or yellow journalism, tabloids, etc.)  But a school of journalism arose that claimed that no writer can divorce himself from his own opinions, even when trying to be objective.  So why bother?  Advocacy Journalism began to replace Objective Journalism in the 70’s and especially after the Watergate scandal.  Now it was okay to just fill in the blanks with opinion if you could disguise it cleverly.  The public still expected Truth, but you would give them a story. Journalists often had college degrees and didn’t want to do the dirty work of fact finding except perhaps to sit in an office and search the internet.  The Net cut into profits for the news organizations and fewer investigative folks were left.  Hence the mainstream media is left with many serial exaggeraters, narrative writers, and anchormen who just make spit up. (Sorry, I lied about the ‘p’ in ‘spit’ again. Add to this, the observation that modern (especially leftist) audiences just want to hear what they agree with and don’t care about the facts. From all this havoc, are spawned other mediums of talk radio and bloggers who make much sport of exposing the constant journalistic fibbing.  

            So it isn’t Agnew at all.  I wish someone on TV would say it plainly like this.  I guess they are all journalists and would be fired from such cannibalistic exposés.