US General Accused of Using "Psyop" on Americans in AFG

[82redleg]

They only appear to be unnormal because investigative journalism has dwindled away in the U.S. and because the people aren't used to it any more.

If the load of bull$hit that RS published in the LTC Holmes story passes as "investigative journalism" to you, then I'm sorry.

The idiot author obviously didn't investigate anything, there were so many half-truths, misconstructions and misconceptions in that article, it hurt to read it. Critiques of the article have been posted- I'm not going through them again. I'm just arguing with your characterization of the article as "investigative". It read more like a semi-retarded junior high student puked back up whatever crap LTC Holmes fed him, after spinning it in the worst possible way.

[Ken White]

I doubt Fuchs thinks that's a paragon of investigative journalism. Doubt anyone does. I sure don't -- but I do agree with
Fuchs that the genre is virtually non-existent in the US today -- what now passes is for it amounts, like the subject article, to a supermarket tabloid sort of expose.

Thus you get the Assange's etc. out looking for some muck to rake. We started out with sensationalist news media, finally got real in the 1940s and 50s but it's been back down the hill pretty much since. It's really pathetic...

[Fuchs]

My take is that Rolling Stone at least attempts to do some investigative journalism. I don't like this to be termed 'Assange envy'.

I recently read how some newspaper praised itself for exposing that presidential wannabe despite his denials. It took them months and apparently a huge amount of work hours. This kind of effort has become rare in a media landscape that hires pundits for partisan brawling, sends its reporters into war zones as embeds (cuz it's so cheap), uses viewer-made videoclips fished out of Youtube or even directly asked fro in shows (CNN) and and and...


Regrettably, the German media landscape hasn't much investigative journalism either, but at least we have a bit less of the other superficial stuff.

We started out with sensationalist news media, finally got real in the 1940s and 50s but it's been back down the hill pretty much since. It's really pathetic...

40's? Really? Weren't three years of that decade soaked in wartime propaganda?
50's? Really? Weren't three or four years of them soaked in McCarthy's media whoring?

[Ken White]

40's? Really? Weren't three years of that decade soaked in wartime propaganda?

Well, 3/10=30%. that means the vast majority were at least somewhat journalistic (which is not the same thing as totally accurate...).

50's? Really? Weren't three or four years of them soaked in McCarthy's media whoring?

Nah, less than one and a half -- that's only 10-15%, thus >85% was reasonably sensible most of the time...

In the 60s things started downhill, fairly slowly, continued to decline slightly in the 70s and 80, took an abrupt downturn in the 90s as the entertainment industry bought all the TV news guys -- who in turned adversely influenced the print media.

Maybe, hopefully, it's cyclical; and they'll have an epiphany.

[Pete]

Investigative journalism is a double-edged sword and at times can be downright pernicious. After Watergate a generation of reporters thought they too could be superstars if they played their cards right and found some dramatic and shocking story. Most news is boring and shouldn't be jazzed up to make it seem to be more dramatic than it really is. The other night I reread stuff about the Janet Cooke affair at the Washington Post in 1980; she was an attractive African-American woman reporter in her 20s hired by the Post who fabricated a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict in Washington DC. When she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize the Toledo Blade contacted the Post and said there were falsehoods in the canned biography of her that the Pulitzer people were publishing. After that Bob Woodward and another Post editor confronted her and after questioning she admitted that her news story and the educational credentials she claimed to have were fakes.

[Cannoneer No. 4]

"Investigative journalism," "muckraking," "agit-prop" and "opposition research" all seem to attract more writers of words than doers of deeds. The premise of the "investigative journalist" starts out with a problem that can be spun into a controversy, then a scandal, then a resignation or indictment and show trial, essentially a psychological operation to gin up lawfare to nonkinetically decapititate ideological enemies.