Witness the brouhaha over “Hillary’s Tearful Breakdown.” I assume x number of sheeple bought the sound bite hook line and sinker. Then again, a significant amount of the masses thought “whoa, I better check out this breakdown” and eagerly looked downloaded the relevant video clip looking for a trainwreck. What they got was something far less and a far cry from what the sound bite, lead ins, ad nauseum repetition would have suggested. (just in case any one missed it, link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqGl-pDnYMQ
IMHO, it’s not a vast media conspiracy to take someone out. Rather it’s a number of independent reporters trying to file something that will be picked up. The sound bite is viral marketing.
One can hear the news or more usually get it 3rd hand, and then quickly see for oneself what the real deal is. For example, this link is Dean’s Scream: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5FzCeV0ZFc. The scream that supposedly put a hoodoo death spell on his big for the Presidency. (Please someone correct me if this is a link to the wrong scream, I can not for the life of me imagine this put the nail in someone’s political coffin.)
The question or debate is if in this day and age, is the sound bite being marginalized by people who can easily check it out for themselves? I don’t live in the US and not sure how significant this is but suspect as a society we are at a tipping point where the ability to get the news yourself without spin is going to reduce the ability of headlines and sound bites to add it editorial spin.
Seeing what the reaction to the Hillary “breakdown” is might become your answer, but to lay bets, I would guess that YouTube isn’t going to fix this issue. There might be some minority who will double-check their news source if you make it easy enough to do so, but most people are too lazy.
Well, it didn’t. Not the clip you posted. That didn’t raise many, if any, eyebrows when it was shown on TV. The damaging soundbite was the isolated microphone feed someone put on the net. Without the crowd noise, it sounded as if Dean was tripping out, when in fact, he was only being loud to be heard over the crowd noise, and it didn’t sound jarring in context. Then someone posted the mike feed, out of context, and it was circulated and remixed and taken by many people at face value. And that, not the Fox footage, was what caused Dean’s campaign to end in disgrace (instead of just ending).
So in that case, it was the internet that caused the problem. I do understand what you’re saying, but I think the bottom line is, people believe what they want to believe. And they group up on the net just as they do in meatspace, which tends to discourage looking for proof contrary to their agendas.
Ok. This is the second time I have read that the original scream was much more weird, being heard over eerie silence. Does anyone have a link to that one?
Yep; much as I like to blame Fox News for stuff, in this case there was a general lack of responsible jouralism. CNN ran that isolated mike feed over and over without explaining the context or why it sounded that way.
There are all sorts of ways for people to do their own research, but it still requires that they care enough to want to make informed decisions.
(When somebody uses the term “sheeple” these days, is it automatically an ironic joke? Otherwise it sounds ridiculously pretentious.)