Distortion

Nobody asked but …

Mark Twain once opined, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”  One can only imagine what he might have said about cable news.  There are vast numbers of the public, however, who form their convictions from headlines and teasers.  Those few who stick around long enough to get the proffered stories are regaled with inaccuracies.

Even the details that the reporters may get to, down in the bowels of the story, are imprecise to a fault.  On television, cable and network, those details are just as corrupted toward a point-of-view as are the headlines and teases.  In print media, the major culprit is ignorance on the part of the writers, abetted by laziness and/or a refusal to admit inexpertise on any topic.

I challenge you to take any news story, print or electronic, and find it free of distortion.  Then I challenge you to find any distortion that is free of the weakness of the media.

— Kilgore Forelle

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