Fear, Bill Moyers and chicken snakes. An MSM parable for our times.

I vaguely remember hearing about this story. (I think it's from a Molly Ivins column, from many, many years ago).

When I started my search, I came across this wonderful address to the Society of Professional Journalists from Bill Moyers on 9/11/2004.

The parable is but one part of this wonderful speech...



And please, read the entire address. It will make you laugh and cry. And, now is the time to take on the chicken snake. MKJ

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0917-02.htm

Sure enough, as merger as followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read, and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than “the news we need to know to keep our freedoms.” One study reports that the number of crime stories on the network news tripled over six years. Another reports that in fifty-five markets in thirty-five states, local news was dominated by crime and violence, triviality and celebrity. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news programs, and on Time and Newsweek, showed that from 1977 to 1997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every fifty stories to one in every fourteen. What difference does it make? Well, its government that can pick our pockets, slap us into jail, run a highway through our back yard, or send us to war. Knowing what government does is “the news we need to keep our freedoms.”

. . . . .

They illustrate the consequences with one story after another. In Cumberland, Maryland, the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him that he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But management had a cost-saving solution: Put a fax machine in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. (“Any police brutality today, Officer?” “No, if there is, we’ll fax a report of it over to you.”) On a larger scale, the book describes a wholesale retreat in coverage of key departments and agencies in Washington. At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter. And incredibly, there were no full-time reporters at the Interior Department, which controls millions of acres of public land and oversees everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

to day events we all experience individually. MKJ