Thursday, November 21, 2013

Media may not be writing their own stories any more.

A few days ago my newspaper did a piece on college professors pay.  Headlines screamed that at least 12 in my state were getting over $100,000.  Text used terms like "raking in" describing the pay.  They listed deans and administrators too, a couple were over 200k.    That list only showed the income of female coaches, not men coaches, if they had shown men they would have a half dozen making several million a year, but that was left out of the story.

In my family I have 4 university professors, 5 plus a 6th retired if I get into the distant cousins.  None of them make much.  They do it because they like it, life on a campus can be fun and entertaining, sports, music, youth.  It's a good living, they do fine, but I know engineers, small business owners, even top notch carpenters and mechanics, computer programmers, who make around what they do.  It certainly seems fair, actually I think they should be making far more, these are the people who are suppose to push our best and brightest up onto the top shelves.

So I was looking on line at that story and suddenly I found the same story in a half dozen states, all published within the last 2 months.  Now I smell a rat.  Some anti tax or anti education group, or the Kochs, some rat has written this story and given it to papers in various states, shit the stories were very similar, all the locals had to do was download the state universities pay scale, which they published with names attached.  


4 comments:

  1. This is nothing new, most of the media are merely stenographers!!

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  2. Most newspaper content is about 90 percent press releases and 10% actual local writing. I used to work for a small town daily; my job back then (mid-1980s) was to take all the canned press releases that came in the mail and type them into the Compugraphic to be typeset. The reading public may have been naive enough to believe we were actually writing stuff ourselves, but of course we weren't. This is a long, long tradition in the newspaper business. Take a look at any newspaper from 100 years ago -- it'll be a mix of local news and canned stuff from god knows where.

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  3. That is why I attack the editorial page with my venom grams...


    Sarge

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  4. Thankfully, Dunedin, New Zealand hasn't caught on. Oh, they do publish news sourced from Reuters on the international scene, but they also employ local staff to report on local issues - and have a number of awards for their efforts. As an added bonus, every Monday our Otago Daily Times contains a World Focus section with articles from a variety of news sources. Not like the US where instead of daring to challenge public views, perceptions, and stereotypes, "newspapers" and "news channels" on television pander to all of the above plus innate prejudice.

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