Saturday, July 12, 2008

"Moral Panic"

The paper goes on to rip apart the media in blowing up these technopanics, often using outright incorrect or made up data, such as the idea that "50,000 sexual predators are online at any given time," a favorite of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The problem is that this number was made up out of nowhere.
And from this, legislation is enacted.

If you've agreed with any of my Chris Hansen posts, you should find this interesting. It discusses the manipulation behind the hysteria, as well as the results.

Not that we've ever seen that from our good friends and government watchdogs, the "Authorized Journalists"

[Via Sam W]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If the people are not sufficiently fearful to place their destiny in your hands, manufacture fear, out of whole cloth, if necessary. Then "help" them "feel" safe from the unfounded fear.

Voila! One small backward step for mankind, one giant leap for tyranny.

Anonymous said...

About 300,000 people gather in the streets in South Korea every day to protest imports of American beef because of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. What was it, THREE cows ever diagnosed here with mad cow disease?
They eat dogs never inspected by the FDA.
But panic, get on TV. It's a cycle.
Hamas and Hezbollah don't march and chant until the cameras roll.
The media have the attitude "We don't break the news, we MAKE the news."
By rewriting -- a little -- press releases from government officials with an agenda.
Sometimes they get caught, like a freshman who plagiarizes an online report FULL OF MISTAKES.

Anonymous said...

Defender, you need to know that its against federal law to check every beef livestock for mad cow. Testing is very, very limited.
Today's media is willfully engaged in propaganda which in the big picture cheats people out of their money through new taxes and a lost of rights, along with growing government at all levels.
My feeling on this is we need to sue the media system that prints such propaganda under RICO because the Constitutions gives the media the job of reporting the truth and protects it. The Constitution doesn't allow the media to use that part of the Constitution to destroy other parts of the Constitution and enslave the American people through bold faced lies, half truths and propaganda. Any media outlet that has been in a court of law and used the First Amendment to protect its sources has opened themselves up to being named in such a class action law suit.