No More War Of The Worlds?
Caroline McCarthy, Staff Writer, CNET News.com wrote a Halloween piece, Could the ‘War of the Worlds’ scare happen today?, wondering if something like the Orson Welles 1938 radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds, which caused some level of panic, could occur today.
The consensus in the article is that there is too much diversity in the media and the competition causes so much fact checking that it is impossible for something like that to occur on any widespread basis today.
Excuse me, but what about the claims about Iraq that resulted in a real war with thousands of deaths? Where was this “fact checking” of which you speak? The media of all types went along, promoting those who made the claims based on distorted intelligence, and ignored those who where trying to point out the errors.
The case for war with Iraq is every bit as much of a work of fiction as H.G. Wells’s novel, and instead of verifying the claims being made, the media enthusiastically supported them, even as UN weapons inspectors on the ground were reporting the claims were without merit.
This is why we need more media diversity, not less, and why we need ‘Net Neutrality – the current corporations that own the channels of communication put their own interests before their readers, viewers, and listeners. Dissonate voices are not offered a stage under the current system.
2 comments
Where was this “fact checking” of which you speak?
isn’t that the truth? the author of that article says that hypercompetitiveness of the media leads them to factcheck each other, but what we’ve really seen is that [1] hype is the operative word, and [2] the hypercompetitiveness only leads them to top each others’ stories in sensationalsim, rather than in facts.
it’s true that ordinary citizens seemed to have not noticed the lite-brites, and that bloggers were quick to out them as harmless, but between the homeland security-itis of the law and the completely uncritical eye [and minds] of the media, this country could easily be stampeded into thinking [just as an example] that iran is sending nukes our way and we’ve only got a few more minutes to live.
aliens from outer space, otoh… only a few crackpots in nw florida would believe that.
Given all of the testing of weird stuff that takes place on Eglin I can understand why Gulf Breeze is such a center for UFOs. I had a pretty bad start the first time I saw a Russian helicopter flying near Crestview in the north county.