Duh. Yes. :P *L* Seriously though, here's just ONE example of the media lying to us, which I posted sometime in 1997 to a mailing list. I added a few things to it since then...

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Ganymede (James Han) writes:

There was a DISTURBING case of inaccurate reporting by the media which I heard about from my friends at Brown University:

John Stossel of ABC and 20/20 did a feature on Brown University, a college "known" for its liberal-ness and political activism. Stossel did a feature on a controversial date rape case at Brown (basically the student who was charged with the crime got off scot free and other students were protesting), and when he interviewed a group of protesters at Brown, he posed such rude, sexist, manipulative, and inappropriate questions (e.g. John Stossel asked, "if I said 'f--- you' to a woman would I be raping her?") and he spoke in a very condescending way so that the people being interviewed got very angry, and quite rightly so.

Trouble is, Stossel had the videocamera switched on AFTER the people got angry (either that or he edited out the part where he was being rude) and then he recorded himself being all nice and polite and asking APPROPRIATE questions to a group of women (and men) who, to the viewing audience, were "inexplicably" riled at the polite questions Stossel was asking. So when the feature aired on 20/20 Stossel gave this IMPRESSION that the women were being angry for no reason and that they were femiNazis, when in fact they were just righteously riled because John Stossel had been acting so rude and sexist before. (The sample question I mention above was actually one of the tamer questions that Stossel had asked the protesters.) But how could a non-Brown person who was just watching TV know about this, when 20/20 didn't air the part of the feature where Stossel was being rude? Stossel has no journalistic ethics in that he used underhanded tricks to paint Brown as a school that was "liberal fascist" and "too Politically Correct" - all just to get himself a good story for that week. I can't believe a guy like him has won journalism awards.

As a former student at Brown I had people coming up to me, and worried mothers (whose kids were thinking of going to Brown) even called me, asking me if Brown really was as overly Politically Correct at John Stossel had reported. I had a time of it setting the record straight.

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Someone else, a Brown student on the mailing list, replied to my post. This is what she said...

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I was very pleased to see that James knows the truth about what is going on when he talked about media and how John Stossel has skewed events that had happened at Brown. I can safely say that the MEDIA COMPLETELY LIES TO US, and it has taken this show for me to realize how completely true this is. In the segment about Brown, almost everything that Stossel said was wrong and untrue, even down to telling the audience that he came to Brown in November, when he was actually here at Brown in January.

I guess what kills me the most is that he created his own story. James knew exactly what happened - Stossel said innoppriate remarks to female and male protestors and they reacted in an appropriate way. And of course Stossel's rude comments get edited out.

Another thing that is also important is that one form of media catches on to other forms. Now local newpapers are having articles on Stossel's f---ed up viewpoint. Our college newspaper has published pages and pages of angry letters about the liberal fascist policies at Brown. It makes me so angry that no one knows the real story, that the protesters only represented about 1000 people on an almost 7000 student campus, and those same people were later interviewed. And most of the protesters are part of the International Socialist Organization (which in no way is a bad thing) which is NOT the majority view on campus. Basically Stossel said that the view of a few people on campus was the view of everyone, and that is just wrong. Never have I felt that my voice has been stifled by an overly politically correct and "liberal fascist" feeling on this campus!