Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Truthiness Update

It wasn't that long ago, say last semester, when I had to take a multimedia law class on all sorts of useful things like defamation, NY Times vs. Sullivan, how many laws I break in any given blog post and what my odds are of being successfully sued for it. I got an A in that class.

I've since learned some things, however, that throw the quality of my education into doubt. My professor managed to cover the broad spectrum of media law, but never once mentioned that the news is not legally required to report the news. Put another way, any media outlet can lie and fabricate stories with impunity. Americans enjoy this extension of our first amendment rights thanks to Fox News, defender of freedom, who stood up in a court of law to protect our right to make shit up and pretend it's true.

Thanks to this, Fox News is safe to come up with inventive solutions to news reporting dilemmas, such as how to report on a Republican sex scandal without making Republicans look like asshats. Simple. When the truth is inconvenient, change it.







The key to making this work is never issuing a retraction for your "mistake." This technique is also useful when your party of choice is losing an election in a landslide. Take this gem of a report about the senate election in Rhode Island between Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee and Democratic former state attorney general Sheldon Whitehouse.





Thank you, Florida's Appellate Court of the Second District! If there's one thing I'm sick and tired of, it's the media's obsession with reporting the "truth" and the "facts". There's enough negative things on TV today without bringing the truth into it. While we're at it, I would likely request that Variety magazine report on Firefly's second season airing on ABC this Fall, and I would like 60 Minutes to do a ground breaking piece on the discovery of a new gnostic scroll that reveals the Flying Spaghetti Monster to be the true father of Jesus, and I would really like for the American Journal of Medicine to release a new study declaring that high doses of chocolate are a way to promote weight loss and cure cancer. I'd like that a lot. If you all could get right on that, that would be greeeeeaaat.

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