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You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. (P.T. Barnum)
Or can you?
It seems to me that the media, both broadcast and Internet, got suckered big time over the Balloon Boy stunt this past week. Meanwhile the important issues of the day were buried in the noise.
And now that it’s been proven that it was all a hoax, what is the press saying about it… that they got suckered, that it’s the fault of those who perpetrated the sham, and that it’s not their fault.
Really?
Sold a lot of newspapers, didn’t they? Many of the Internet News (and I use the term loosely) sites and televised Journalism (?) programmes were full of reports that in the end meant nothing but that people willingly closed their eyes to the truth and got suckered.
What happened to responsible journalism?
It seems to me that much of what the todays press reports resembles what in the past was referred to as Yellow Journalism… Sensationalistic stories filled with prurient innuendo and little, if any, truth.
Are we so desperate as a society that outrageous stunts and scandalous behaviour are more important than the events that affect and shape our lives and the world around us?
Have we, as a society, been conditioned to truly be that gullible?
I fear the answer is yes.
On Dec. 31, 1975, former Lake Superior State University Public Relations Director Bill Rabe and his colleagues cooked up an idea to banish overused words and phrases. Rabe distributed the list on New Year’s Day. In the following weeks, when nominations for the next year’s list came pouring into his office, Rabe said he knew the list would endure. He was correct.
The LSSU PR office still receives thousands of nominations every year from people who never seem to tire of talking about words and language.
And so, without further ado, the 2009 banished word list from LSSU.
This December, if all goes well at the Large Hadron Collider, they will be testing one of the most bizarre theories in science.
Nothing as revolutionary as extra dimensions of space-time or dark matter or even black holes that will eat the Earth.
What they will be testing is the notion that the collider is being sabotaged by its own future.
A pair of physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature itself that, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather, its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one.
