Media Fatigue

[uruk]

A frind of mine sent me this URL:
http://www.fark.com/2007/book/chapter1.shtml

There was something interesting mentioned in the article about how the media presents news, particularly in the live reporting of a news event (such as 9/11)
Here's a excerpt form the web article posted abouve:

"The challenge of reporting is to continually come up with new information on the issues on which you're reporting. This can be extremely difficult if not impossible when dealing with sudden emergencies. Most terrorist attacks fit this pattern. Initially, the media is blindsided by the event. Initial reports start coming in, the vast majority of which are inaccurate. Media outlets don't have the option to remain silent about breaking news. Having nothing else to talk about, they repeat the rumors. Unfortunately, they either don't realize that people take rumor information as fact from mainstream news outlets, or they do realize it but feel they have plausible deniability by reporting rumors as rumor rather than fact.

As minutes and hours pass, rumors are dispelled and real information comes in. Toward the end of a twenty-four-hour period the media usually has a pretty good handle on what actually happened."

And there you have source for the "sound bites" and "evidence" of CT'rs.

 

[Horatius]

I think we should start a compliation of news reports of such events, to catalogue exactly how such reporting changes over the first few hours. I started a thread a few months back on one such event:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63831

but I'm sure we could come up with others as time goes by. Perhaps there's somewhere we could compile a list of links to such threads, for future reference.

 

[chipmunk stew]

The Sago Mine disaster is a perfect example.