Sunday, September 12, 2004
Liquid Facts
Mitch Kehetian wrote in the Sunday Macomb Daily editorial that Goldwater lost the campaign because Johnson ran commercials of a little girl swinging as the atomic bomb mushroomed behind her, equating Goldwater with nuclear war and that it demonstrates how dangerous Cheney's statement was. The now infamous Daisy Spot was not a little girl on a swing. I guess he was thinking of the Gov. Schwarzenegger film The Terminator where Linda Hamilton dreamed about a devastating future.
There was once (literally) a Pro-Johnson commercial of a little girl in a field counting daisy petals. The commercial was shown once and only once on September 7, 1964, during NBC's Monday Night Movie. Not that many people saw it. But, certainly, a lot of people heard about it. The Tony Schwartz commercial showed a little girl mixed up with her petal counting, then the scene changed, and a voice counted down 10, 9, 8, 7... to the mushroom cloud, and then the voice of Lyndon B. Johnson was heard reading a poem about people learning to live together, then a message of "vote for Johnson -– the stakes are too high." You can view the film clip here.
This inaccuracy is just the type of thing that is making so many of us so mad. There is no news, just opinions. Reporters used advance copies of convention speeches, not as tools for writing the political stories, but as the basis for the stories themselves, before the speeches were even given. Pretending to write news. Any third grader can write a book report. Any fifth grader can re-hash other journalists’ stories and sound bites. Quoting unidentified White House sources (who -- the janitors)? Is there no respect or thought of the readers -- just assumptions that we are all too dumb or too lazy to look up the truth for ourselves? Then what do we pay you for? Why am I so mad?
Last Friday, the Macomb Daily published a front page story titled New Documents Shed Light, Add Mystery to Bush Service -- Records Show He Lost Pilot Status for Disobeying. What???? Did anyone in the newsroom think to verify a front page story? Or do we just reprint propaganda and garbage off the wire services as if anything anti-Bush must be true?
Just about every person with some familiarity with typewriters and word processors who has seen these so called memos can see the forgery. The world of internet users is going nuts with excitement over this one. The Blogosphere is buzzing with their scoop over the mainstream media. My own son has put up his entire savings ($10,000) in a challenge to anyone who can recreate these memos with an ordinary 1972 office typewriter as used by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. And he has been promised more than $20,000 additional by visitors to his site, defeatjohnjohn.com. That is the depth of his anger. He is willing to put his money where his beliefs are. And his beliefs are simple. He believes in Truth.
Many years ago, a young editor of the Richmond Review said "if a story is important enough to put in our paper, it's important enough for us to cover it." He was just a kid. The Richmond Review was just a free weekly. But I long for that standard of work ethic in today’s media.
The founding fathers of this nation gave us in the very first amendment to the Constitution, a freedom of the press. They had a trust in the American people to be able to make the right decisions by having the opportunity to make informed decisions. Having a press that manipulates and interprets opinions for their own political beliefs will destroy that freedom, and soon after the Constitution itself.
Mitch Kehetian wrote in the Sunday Macomb Daily editorial that Goldwater lost the campaign because Johnson ran commercials of a little girl swinging as the atomic bomb mushroomed behind her, equating Goldwater with nuclear war and that it demonstrates how dangerous Cheney's statement was. The now infamous Daisy Spot was not a little girl on a swing. I guess he was thinking of the Gov. Schwarzenegger film The Terminator where Linda Hamilton dreamed about a devastating future.
There was once (literally) a Pro-Johnson commercial of a little girl in a field counting daisy petals. The commercial was shown once and only once on September 7, 1964, during NBC's Monday Night Movie. Not that many people saw it. But, certainly, a lot of people heard about it. The Tony Schwartz commercial showed a little girl mixed up with her petal counting, then the scene changed, and a voice counted down 10, 9, 8, 7... to the mushroom cloud, and then the voice of Lyndon B. Johnson was heard reading a poem about people learning to live together, then a message of "vote for Johnson -– the stakes are too high." You can view the film clip here.
This inaccuracy is just the type of thing that is making so many of us so mad. There is no news, just opinions. Reporters used advance copies of convention speeches, not as tools for writing the political stories, but as the basis for the stories themselves, before the speeches were even given. Pretending to write news. Any third grader can write a book report. Any fifth grader can re-hash other journalists’ stories and sound bites. Quoting unidentified White House sources (who -- the janitors)? Is there no respect or thought of the readers -- just assumptions that we are all too dumb or too lazy to look up the truth for ourselves? Then what do we pay you for? Why am I so mad?
Last Friday, the Macomb Daily published a front page story titled New Documents Shed Light, Add Mystery to Bush Service -- Records Show He Lost Pilot Status for Disobeying. What???? Did anyone in the newsroom think to verify a front page story? Or do we just reprint propaganda and garbage off the wire services as if anything anti-Bush must be true?
Just about every person with some familiarity with typewriters and word processors who has seen these so called memos can see the forgery. The world of internet users is going nuts with excitement over this one. The Blogosphere is buzzing with their scoop over the mainstream media. My own son has put up his entire savings ($10,000) in a challenge to anyone who can recreate these memos with an ordinary 1972 office typewriter as used by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. And he has been promised more than $20,000 additional by visitors to his site, defeatjohnjohn.com. That is the depth of his anger. He is willing to put his money where his beliefs are. And his beliefs are simple. He believes in Truth.
Many years ago, a young editor of the Richmond Review said "if a story is important enough to put in our paper, it's important enough for us to cover it." He was just a kid. The Richmond Review was just a free weekly. But I long for that standard of work ethic in today’s media.
The founding fathers of this nation gave us in the very first amendment to the Constitution, a freedom of the press. They had a trust in the American people to be able to make the right decisions by having the opportunity to make informed decisions. Having a press that manipulates and interprets opinions for their own political beliefs will destroy that freedom, and soon after the Constitution itself.
