A peeved press has accused Fox News Channel correspondent Geraldo Rivera of false reporting, warmongering and questionable antics during his assignment in Afghanistan...
"Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera... was hundreds of miles from the site of a friendly fire incident he reported on... Nowhere near site of U.S. casualties, as he claimed."
Indeed, on Dec. 6, Mr. Rivera told his viewers he was in Kandahar, on the "hallowed" spot where three Americans had been killed the day before. But Baltimore Sun television columnist David Folkenflik called him on it, eventually getting Mr. Rivera to concede via satellite phone that he had been to the north in Tora Bora.
posted on December 19, 2001 12:01:49 PM
Why am I not surprised he exaggerates his own importance over there?
I hated his florid reports the first few days he was there. He's calmed down now to more ordinary language.
At first he was wearing a different hat in every news report too.. it was like a hat style parade. Cowboy hat when he was riding on the back of the pickup, then a variety of different local headgear and headdresses.
I admit it. I am a news junkie and watch constantly plus we get 4 newspapers everyday. Of course I get my most uptodate political news from... the RT.
posted on December 19, 2001 12:23:33 PM
I was inspired by him having just come from watching his hour into th thread about dogs.
The 'hallowed ground' he did such a fine drama queen report about is actually 300 miles from where he was. Apparently he thought that a cave, or hollowed ground was holy.
posted on December 19, 2001 02:16:27 PM
There's a current thread "The creation of public opinion". In it quite a few have commented about the "dumbing down of Americans"....
Which came first??? Shows like FOX NEWS (which I classify, loosely, as a sit-com not necessarily NEWS BROADCASTING) which contributes to our being "dumbed down" or did Fox happen because we are so "dumb" or perhaps more accurately, so shallow, that we aren't sufficiently entertained by the real thing and we want to be entertained more than we want to be informed ?????
There's "money, money, money" (grabing another thread title-'cause I'm not real creative) in ratings. To get ratings, they do what they must do to get us dumb folks to watch them and not those.....
posted on December 19, 2001 03:36:29 PM
It's that clever people know how dumb the majority portion of the viewer base is, and simply design programming to appeal to that majority. The news is particularly fruitful for them because it can also give the dumb ones a source from which they can feel as though they speak with authority. After all, they saw it in the 'mainline news' and so it must be true. People who subscribe to such sources do so with a dumb fervor that does't allow for variance and for them it's the truth, the ONLY truth. Anything else is treated as though it was blasphemous.
