by Sufjan Simone

Created on: December 20, 2008

Magicians and Bunnies in the Newsroom

Magicians are in a trade.
They satisfy an audience's craving for the fantastic, the impossible, the breathtaking. They know the best contraptions to use, the best colours of smoke to release, the slightest gesture to reveal and conceal at the precise moment. They suck you in a narrative of sorts, preparing and priming you for that special moment, and then a quick flourish and VOILA!

They know the tricks of the trade, so to speak.

Mainstream corporate media is in a trade. They are run with the intent to sell texts and images and, unlike the distant origins of journalism that strives to reveal the uncompromising truth, mainstream media aims to keep the status quo and not rock the boat of complacency. There are exceptions, of course, but in more recent times there have been fewer and fewer brave media people willing to risk their jobs and even their own lives by going against approved storylines and perspectives.

Those who put out "news" have many ways of revealing and concealing things. Some tricks are easy to spot as outright lies and fabrications.
Some "news reports" are mere repetitions or muffled Amens to greater powers
political, corporate, religious, military, etc. and, by mere repetition, are assumed to be facts by the less critical reader or "consumer" of news, details not meant to be questioned.

These types of media people view their readers as uncritical and feed them the same information from the same sources but spiced up or slightly changed to add some variety.
Their positions remain the same.

It would be quite easy to pinpoint outright lies in a news article. Some tricks are more subtle and so we shall reveal just one of them for now.

In the aftermath of the historic "Throwing of the Shoes at Outgoing President Bush" which to some people may seem a mundane and totally irrelevant event in world affairs there has been an unprecedented flurry of activities from protest rallies in various parts of the world to show support for the reporter, proliferation of internet-based games depicting alternate scenarios, and numerous articles full of accurate or fictional information.

When will we see the end to this current media frenzy? As of this writing, a week after the event, the reporter who was catapulted to fame has not been shown in public. A judge who has seen him says he has been badly injured.

In a 19 December 2008 Associated Press article entitled "Iraqi judge says shoe-throwing reporter was beaten" credited to Qassim
Abdul-Zahra

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