I will never understand the trust people place in journalists. At a basic level a journalist is a person who, having completed their schooling, attended a tertiary education facility in order to... learn to express themselves through the medium of the written word. That’s it, they spend four years in order to specialise in a discipline in which the vast majority can already be considered expert by their early teenage years. They have no expertise in any area, their job is to try and interpret complex information and simplify it for people unable to comprehend the complex information, but there is no reason to believe the journalist is any better able to understand the complex information than the reader. It’s fools being led by the foolish. You can get pissed off at the likes of Fauci or whoever for inconsistency or dishonesty or whatever but at least he has to be acting maliciously in order to disseminate false information; journalists just need to be ignorant and/or stupid to disseminate false information. And we have a few decades of evidence of journos being ignorant and/or stupid. Yet still so many treat these morons as high priests. I find it so strange.
Fun Fact - I was a journalist. I had zero qualifications. I used to take pictures for the newspaper (also had zero qualification, was just good at photography) and one day got introduced to some people from a national tv station and they gave me a job. I was young, pretty, and stupid. The money helped me pay for university (nurse/paramedic), and to raise my kids after my husband died. Anyway, it's 90% bullshit, 10% truth in my experience. You purposely have to ramp everything up and make it as dramatic as you can.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
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