Saturday, May 28, 2005
How The US Press Corps Operates
Get a load of Ron Fournier's slanted opening paragraph of his hit piece on that craaaazy guy, Howard Dean:
Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, who famously refused to prejudge Osama bin Laden's guilt, is standing by his judgment that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay may deserve jail time for allegations of corruption.Oh, how awful! Dean supports those evil smelly brownskinned terrorists! At least, that's what Ron Fournier would have you believe. But is that really what Dean actually said and did RE: Osama? Before I end the suspense on that count, here's something you should know: Modern journalism is based on the concept of the "pyramid lead". The idea is that since most of your readers will be skimming the headlines and maybe the first paragraph or two of any given story, you put the key facts right up front. But nowadays, the key facts in certain stories, if they get mentioned at all, tend to be shoved way down into the article -- where they get missed by most folks. This is called "burying the lede." Burying the lede is done for two main reasons: For honest journalists working under an increasingly totalitarian and corrupt conservative-corporate media régime, it's how they smuggle facts onto the printed page. But for dishonest ones, it's a way to censor information while claiming to provide it. Here's how: Ever write to a reporter complaining that Story X didn't get covered or mentioned? And did that reporter write back saying that "We certainly did mention it -- here, we mentioned it once in this article here", and you went to look at the article and found out the story was mentioned in the twenty-fourth paragraph of a twenty-five paragraph article, that itself was printed on Page A14, well away from the front of the paper? That's what I'm talking about. But anyway, back to Howard and Osama. Wanna know what Howard did, that Fournier wanted to put in such a horrible light? Here's the fifth paragraph of the story:
As a Democratic presidential candidate in December 2003, Dean refused to say whether bin Laden should be tried in the United States and put to death for terrorism. "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials," Dean said in 2003.There you go. By the way: Even Hitler's minions got jury trials. That's what Nuremberg was all about. And when the WTC was first attacked, Bill Clinton used the power of the law, not the military, to bring the perps to justice. Bush used the military option, and Osama's still free.
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Heh! Speaking of the WWF (which is now the WWE), go pick up Mick Foley's book Foley is Good. It talks about how, among other things, the real world is often faker than wrestling. He has some choice data on L. Brent Bozell, for one thing.
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