The Week in Bullshit...

[tp6626]

Thought it might be an interesting game for us to attempt to rewrite media / news stories in the no-nonsense INTJ way, as most of the time, the reporter is plain wrong, the report is littered with bias, and miraculous meaning has been found from actually a very small amount of input data.

For example:

"Credit card interest rates at their highest for 12 years..." (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.)

Whilst BOE base rates are the lowest they've been ever (that's over the past 316 years)! This shows that the banks have very little confidence in the BOE base rate as an indicator of market stability. They're effectively doing what they want regardless.

As for likely effects, then those in debt are going to find it increasingly harder to get out of that debt, as banks continue to attempt to rebuild their balance sheets.

Ultimately there will be increasing numbers of people defaulting over the coming months.

You have to ask yourself what chance anyone making mortgage repayments with their credit cards actually has now? Repossessions will also increase.

Not much more than that can be read into it. :)

Hardly publishable (I'll admit my version is slightly guilty of bias too), but padding-out with bullshit is an action reserved for those in the 'professional media' only.

So, anyone else care to have a stab at this?

[SShack]

A fun story to make your bang your head against the wall from within the media.

A few years back the U.S. had its Base Realignment and Closure review from military facilities. We have two in our community and they're our biggest employers, so of course, everybody is concerned. One we knew was safe and would be likely to expand. The other had been targeted in the past, though, and we expected it to get targeted again.

So the report is released and the Associated Press does their story on it based on an early summary. They were apparently unaware that the early summary only included the biggest changes and presented the story as though this was a complete list. We -- not realizing what the AP had done -- post this online telling readers that our base wasn't affected. It wasn't on the list.

Well, an hour later the full report gets posted online. I check it out and discover that actually our base was mentioned. A couple of hundred jobs were going to be moved to another base. The change was considered too small to be included in the early summary.

So we have to amend our story of course to explain to folks exactly what the report says. I decide to actually call the Associated Press to let them know that their story is inaccurate and their list of recommended changes is incomplete.

They didn't care. They told me they would not correct their story because it was too small. The local radio station had picked up the AP story and was broadcasting that our bases would not be affected. I was getting calls from people arguing with me about the conflicting reports. Eventually I had to call the radio station and give them verbal permission to use our story on the air just to end the community confusion.

And that was the day that I realized I had better standards at my 5,000-circ. publication than the largest media service in the country.

[Syntax]

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In order to deal with the media running away with this "story" and ruining his financial life in the process for no good reason some rich guy was forced to hire some public relations experts to help win the public over to his side so he can keep what he's earned.

[SShack]

The Story: To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.



In order to deal with the media running away with this "story" and ruining his financial life in the process for no good reason some rich guy was forced to hire some public relations experts to help win the public over to his side so he can keep what he's earned.


In addition
We use "man on the street" interviews to pad out the fact that we don't really have anything worthwhile to report about the subject.