From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Apr 17 2003 - 10:09:19 MDT
Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
>Robert,
> You and Amara are totally correct but I do believe you miss the point
>or perhaps I didn't state my case well enough.
> There is enough available on line, in English, of the events of the
>world, that we need not be ignorant of the motives of the world. There is no
>reason for people to be able to tell us a cock and bull story without our
>being able to get at the truth.
> If you look up and read the Jordanian Times, Al Jazeera, and that
>paper out of Saudi Arabia you will find they let the cat out of the bag all
>the time. It is said that no Moslem country has a democratic government --
>you can easily see that the papers are used by the ruling class to lead the
>man in the street. Go read, please.
>Ron h.
>
And the English papers aren't used by the ruling class to lead the man
in the street? I can tell what the papers say. And I can usually tell
who they are speaking to. But telling how truthful they are being at
any one time is a much more difficult problem. I do know that news in
the US is processed (almost always) for entertainment value. Sometimes
for political value instead, but more usually the political value is
secondary to the entertainment value. Truth falls into a distant fourth
place. (Selling things is usually third.) And I know that I tend to
judge the news from other countries by the same standard, but with a
great deal less certainty that I'm correct. I've never observed
something there, and then later seen it reported, so I have only an
intuitive calibration.
But I do know that even in the US local news frequently has vastly
different opinions about things (not only about what it means, but about
how important it is, and even about what happened). And this new rarely
shows up anywhere on the web. So I suspect that our knowledge of things
which we only see in translation is ... did you ever play the game
"Telephone?" Did you ever read the Eric Frank Russell story titled "Top
Secret"? If so, you know what I mean, if not, I can only say I expect
that a lot is ... transformed ... during the generational copying. I'm
not implying any motive, or even direction to the transformation.
Merely a degradation of accuracy that verges on the extreme, this in a
channel that didn't start out as any shining example of a low noise
transmission medium.
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