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ElizabethB
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Irresponsible News MediaHellow Allo,

Hello All,

Have you ever heard "I saw it on the Internet" or "It was posted on the Internet by XYZ News"?

I am frequently insulted by the mindless, un-researched, bogus information put out by the news media.

This week -

Person bitten by snake in Lowe's Garden Center

Discrepancies -

Victim: Customer or Employee
Location of bite: Arm, hand or head
Location of store:
City: Lincoln or Denver
State: North Carolina, Colorado, Mississippi

How appallingly stupid. The media can not get together on their "facts" - correct or incorrect. What a bunch of jokers.

Lesson learned:

Never believe what you read on the internet unless you can verify the information

Apply Critical Thinking to anything you read on the internet or read from friends, buds and family. The information is false until you can prove it true.

My Rant for the Day

Elizabeth

ButterflyLady29
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Last winter it was allover the news here that around 12 or so dogs had been killed and dumped in a creek. Turned out later (after a couple weeks) that it was one old coyote that died of natural causes.

It's not just one news crew, seems like the exaggeration and outright lies are all across the board. It's just a rating game, none of the people in charge care about the truth or getting the truth out to the public.

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tomf
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The worst offenders are on social media like Facebook, they re-post anything if it agrees with their opinions, it does not matter how untrue it may be. And all to often the person who started the post got their story from one of those internet news bloggers with a political agenda. I feel you have a right to make up your mind based on the facts, you even have a right to chose what facts you want to base your opinion on, but you do not have a right to make up your own facts.

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ElizabethB
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DITTO both Tom and Butterfly,

The miss information from the media is deliberate. The no longer report news. They manufacture news by picking and choosing what they will report. I check out all regular network news and CNN and Fox for diversity. I am frequently amused and appalled by the diverse information on the same subject.

I am old enough to remember when news was news and not a personal opinion.

I am saddened because young people do not have the advantage of knowing the difference between news and opinion.

All of the c**p on the news make me worry about the future of our country and our children and grandchildren.

I wish I knew a way to combat this cycle of miss information.

PaulF
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News bias has been with us since the 50s and almost all of it slanted to the left. But what has become my pet peeves are that during national news we get so many fluff stories about some actor or singer's dilemma or conquest. The other is during a severely commercial shortened newscast they spend so much time explaining what story is coming up next so by the time the story gets told it has been told at least three or four times. I am sure there are a few more news items that could have been aired.

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Lindsaylew82
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I recently left Facebook JUST for these reasons! I agree all around!

Vanisle_BC
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PaulF wrote:News bias has been ..... almost all of it slanted to the left.
If that's true, why would it be so I wonder? Do you have a theory?

gumbo2176
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This post reminds me of my sister-in-law and her barrage of e-mails she would send me before I finally put a stop to it. ANYTHING she got, she forwarded to her entire mailing list and just about all of them were the silliest, most asinine things I've ever read and she bought into them like they were gospel.

I finally had enough and e-mailed her back with the URL for Snopes so she could see for herself that most of what she sent was pure fiction, because, unfortunately, she was too dense to see them for what they really were. She actually got mad at me for bringing this to her attention. She called one day and wondered why I never respond to her e-mails and I told her they go straight to the Spam file and I delete them. That finally got her to stop sending them to me.

Vanisle_BC
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gumbo2176 wrote:This post reminds me of my sister-in-law and her barrage of e-mails she would send me before I finally put a stop to it.....
And that reminds me of the time someone mis-spelled an edress which made it the same as mine, and it got on the mailing list of a group of chatty/gossipy ladies all belonging to a particular church. Unfortunately one of them must have been somebody's old granny who didn't understand much about email. It took me many weeks to get through to all of them, especially her, that everything they sprayed around the group (often repeated & re-repeated) was coming to my inbox and they could and should fix that.

gumbo2176
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Vanisle_BC wrote:[And that reminds me of the time someone mis-spelled an edress which made it the same as mine, and it got on the mailing list of a group of chatty/gossipy ladies all belonging to a particular church. Unfortunately one of them must have been somebody's old granny who didn't understand much about email. It took me many weeks to get through to all of them, especially her, that everything they sprayed around the group (often repeated & re-repeated) was coming to my inbox and they could and should fix that.

Oh the fun you could have had with that one. Click on "Reply to All" and carpet bomb them with your own brand of humorous gossipy material. If you gave enough shockingly false tidbits of gossip, you could have saved yourself a lot of time as you likely would have been banned ASAP from a group you didn't belong to in the first place. :evil:

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tomf
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The press is slanted left or right according to ones own perception, left leaning people see it slanted to the right and right leaning people see it slanted to the left. I find it is what news source you are listening to. If you listen to only one source you most likely are not looking to be informed but to have your opinions re-enforced. If you are far right or far left then anyone who is moderate is ether left or right depending upon your perspective.

I will not go into politics but will say there is more to every situation than what any of us see or know, and we tend to affirm anything that supports our bias, ideas, perceptions and philosophy, and ignore or discredit anything that does not. This is one reason people write, pass on news, or posts that are biased, half true, a distortion of the truth, or a down right lie; I call this the "if it agrees with what one thinks it must be true syndrome".

What I find saddest is the way we have become so divided and how so many people appear to need some one to hate, to blame, to make others the enemy. Democracy requires working together for the common good and that requires compromise, and I am not seeing much of that in ether government or social media.
My favorite site for news and interesting subject news is Flipboard; Flipboard pulls things from many sources from all over the world and posts the articles that were written by the news sources themselves, or interest sources, so you get a wide verity of everything and anything you may be interested in. Not only do I follow many sources of news but also many of my hobbies and interests in Flipboard. You can customize what categories you want to read about.
I do think this is one of the nice things about The Helpful Gardener, we all just like making things grow and we can agree on that being a good thing.

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tomf
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gumbo2176 wrote:
Vanisle_BC wrote:[And that reminds me of the time someone mis-spelled an edress which made it the same as mine, and it got on the mailing list of a group of chatty/gossipy ladies all belonging to a particular church. Unfortunately one of them must have been somebody's old granny who didn't understand much about email. It took me many weeks to get through to all of them, especially her, that everything they sprayed around the group (often repeated & re-repeated) was coming to my inbox and they could and should fix that.

Oh the fun you could have had with that one. Click on "Reply to All" and carpet bomb them with your own brand of humorous gossipy material. If you gave enough shockingly false tidbits of gossip, you could have saved yourself a lot of time as you likely would have been banned ASAP from a group you didn't belong to in the first place. :evil:
I have had to block some people for this sort of thing, and unfollow some people on Facebook, I do not un-friend I just unfollow so I do not have to read their junk.

Vanisle_BC
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tomf, thank you for those lucid comments about (among other things) left/right bias. I agree completely with your statements and applaud them. I don't think you've said a single thing that runs counter to my own thoughts - which is of course why I applaud :). But I really am delighted to find someone - on the internet of all places - posting such a non-polarised & unbiased item.

Hadn't heard of Flipboard but I'm going there now; thank you.

And yes, The Helpful Gardener is by far the most civil & friendly forum I have ever found.
Last edited by Vanisle_BC on Sun May 22, 2016 12:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Allyn
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It started when the evening news programs were subjected to Neilson ratings. Once they had to keep their ratings up, they could no longer simply 'report' the news, but they had to start sensationalizing it to draw viewers. Then they started putting their own 'spin' on the news trying to influence viewers opinions on it. There is no integrity in news reporting anymore. The day of the honest-to-goodness news journalist who checked every fact before putting it to print is over. Today, anyone with a blog is 'reporting' news, but it's really only opinion pieces and editorials disguised to look like news.



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