Pentagon Official Once Told Morley Safer That Reporters Who Believe the Government Are “Stupid”

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Morley Safer, who was a correspondent on CBS’s 60 Minutes from 1970 until just last week, died Thursday at age 84.

There will be hundreds of obituaries about Safer, but at least so far, there’s been no mention of what I think was one of the most important stories he ever told.

In 1965, Safer was sent to Vietnam by CBS to cover the escalating U.S. war there. That August he filed a famous report showing American soldiers burning down a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters and flamethrowers as children and elderly women and men cowered nearby.

The next year, he wrote a newspaper column about a visit to Saigon by Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs — i.e., the head of all the U.S. military’s PR.

https://theintercept.com/2016/05/20/pentagon-official-once-told-morley-safer-that-reporters-who-believe-the-government-are-stupid/

[Ford_Prefect]

1. If you can't ask the questions you've no business being in the room.

The sign of a good reporter is the questions they ask.

Gonna miss Morley.

[Baobab]

2. I have never seen a prediction on FTAs that wasn't completely wrong.

That equally applies to whether Historically Disadvantaged Groups should trust would be executives' campaign promises.

With certain kinds of people, when they are nice to you, that invariably means they are getting ready to screw you really badly and don't want you to figure it out. So they act really nice to you. Its called "overcompensation".

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3. Those predictions, like most, are bullshit for the Rubes.

The future is not predictable, especially not by deductive methods.

[Baobab]

4. Your're right, less so now than ever before..

The only thing we can be sure of is that it will be different.

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5. Indeed.

Things are changing very fast now, yet we still pretend tomorrow will still be much like say, twenty years ago with a few nice enhancements.

''The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational!'' ~Robert Anton Wilson

“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”
-- Sun Tzu

"We can misuse only things which are good." Montaigne "Of Practice"

“Men will not be free until the last King is strangled with the guts of the last priest.” – Diderot

“Life is the sum of all your choices” – A. Camus (from epigraph to “Silenced” by Allison Brennan)

"Fame is but the empty noise of madmen." -- Epictetus c. 100 AD

"This isn't bad, we have a lot of areas just like this in the Soviet Union." -- Nikita Kruschev on a tour of Harlem at 7:00 AM 1959

"I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other God." – Bruce Chatwin "In Patagonia"

And the relevant one:

"Such euphemisms illustrate one major function of language, which is to keep reality at bay." – John Carey "Eyewitness to History" Introduction

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6. Why Hating the Media Could Make the Difference in November

By Neal Gabler / Moyers & Company

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But within this very angry electorate is another hate boiling, and it may very well alter the course of the election. That is the hate the public feels for the media, especially the mainstream media.

Many of us remember a time when the MSM actually were held in high regard — when CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite was among the most respected men in America, and when Woodward and Bernstein were lionized for helping save democracy from the undemocratic depredations of Richard Nixon. As late as 2005, according to a Gallup survey, more than 50 percent of Americans trusted the media either a “great deal” or a “fair amount.” Not any more. Last year that figure was 40 percent, with the severest doubts among the young.

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But within these numbers there is something interesting. While no one seems to love the MSM the way they did back in the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans like them a lot less than Democrats do. Gallup found that 55 percent of Democrats continue to trust the media, but that trust is shared by only 32 percent of Republicans. And Pew found another partisan disparity, and one significant anti-MSM cavil: Democrats still believe that the press protects democracy rather than harms it, 59 percent to 27 percent, while Republicans believe news organizations hurt rather than help, 46 percent to 43 percent. So basically, a plurality of Republicans has ceased to believe in what had always been one of the primary functions of the media: to serve the democratic process.

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So the destruction of the MSM began at the top, certainly with the right-wing’s own media, Fox News and the radio blatherers, but also presumably among many of the same people who now decry Trump. I don’t want to say the chickens are coming home to roost for the intellectuals among those conservative elites, but the trouble with destroying the idea of press integrity is that once it’s gone, you cannot just revive it to take on a potentially fascist demagogue when you need to.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/why_hating_the_media_could_make_the_difference_in_november_20160522