Media during the pandemic

[Dave A]

On 4/24/2020 at 11:02 AM, Bosco-d-gama said:

Mmmm......   after reading all the hoopla here about [elected official]  “suggestions” I had to review his actual words. In reality he made ‘no’ “suggestions” - he asked ‘questions. ‘IS’ there a way to use disinfectant in the body? ‘CAN’ we use UV light inside the body? Agreed they’re outlandish even as questions...... but IMHO no more outlandish than many statements advanced by people on this thread. It’d be nice if folks would stop rewording facts for their own purposes.

Precisely and [news outlet] did it with malice aforethought. People who gleefully repeat the story are guilty of the same thing since they willfully do not investigate what was said. 

 

  Some things never change and human nature is timeless.

Here are some Thomas Jefferson quotes about newspapers (CNN, MSBSNBC, ABC, NBC etc today's equivalent).  He hated them: 

 

 

1.  "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.  He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." ~Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:225 

 

2.  "I deplore... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them... These ordure’s are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food.  As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief... This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit." ~Thomas Jefferson to Walter Jones, 1814. ME 14:46

 

3.  "As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers." Thomas Jefferson to Barnabas Bidwell, 1806. ME 11:118 

 

4.   "Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." ~Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, 1819. ME 15:179

 

5.  "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.  Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.""

 

Another one

"Lies of the Press to J Norvell, 1807

  It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of it's benefits than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."

  He goes on to say more of the same and ends his letter thusly,

"Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st Truths, the 2nd Probabilities, the 3rd Possibilities, 4th Lies. The first chapter would be very short."