It was a nod to the thread about not saying FUCK and other tasty swear words in the OP Titles, even in The Pit. It didn’t go anywhere in terms of hard policy, but when I typed out, " Fuck Off " I thought of that debate and realized that my title says the same thing and doesn’t require a fuck to make the point.
That’s what the fuck that is.
This Post Brought To You By George Carlin:
" Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. And tits shouldn’t even be on the list !!! "
Well that is 35 years ago. Still a few generations ago. I think the problem is that we live in an era of instant gratification, so so much news these days is more about who is first versus who is right.
Since when is 35 years “a few generations”? A generation is approximately 20 years. To somone in her sixties, it is the day before yesterday. Whether you like it or not, what journalists of the 50s, 60s and 70s did have had a direct bearing on your life.
What if Edward R. Murrow hadn’t had the courage to stand up to McCarthy-Gone-Wild in the 50’s? What about guys like Cartooniverse’s dad who helped to keep the Mafia from dominating everything? And matt’s dad – always putting himself in harm’s way to cover a story. You have only to look at the number of dead and injured reporters in the Middle East to see how dangerous that is. What if Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post had never been? What about recent stories on the way wounded vets are treated at Walter Reed? Where did the stories on wiretapping and bank record surveillance come from?
I can remember feeling so frustrated for the people of the Soviet Union because all they had was Pravada and that had only what the government wanted them to think.
I just noticed. My first pitting. (I hardly ever look in here, so I could be wrong).
And I’m accused of the heinous crime of Reporterphobia.
Would it help if I told you that some of my best friends are reporters?
Maybe not.
Look, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to upset you.
I’m sure your dad was an all round great fellow. He must have belonged to that small, unrepresentative minority of reporters who had never quite succeeded in hijacking that noble profession.
Still, point taken. In future, I’ll restrict my huge dripping broad brush approach to safer targets like TV Evangelists, Republicans, Democrats and people who kick puppies.
(Perhaps not the last one. That attracts ridicule in the Pit, these days).
On a personal level my sample amounts to maybe up to a dozen mostly low echelon print media reporters. A high proportion were chronic liars even in private life.
In my professional dealings, government media relations to press, on only about half a dozen occasions out of maybe fifty or eighty attempts on my/our part did they come close to getting the story correct. You could spoon feed them with the most detailed press release and they, or their higher echelon editors, would still manage to fuck it up.
So I’m not really claiming they’re a total dead loss and on the whole they were mostly a greatly entertaining bunch
Thank you for the apology, I accept it in the spirit in which it was offered. Yes, apparently he was a part of a minority that is being well-represented in this thread.
I know that the broad brush hurts more when it’s being used against yourself or yours, or to smear a group or cause one holds dear.
Well, that’s exactly my point. He should have known better than to go slinging the broad brush around when he himself is in a line of work that is even more commonly (and unfairly) stereotyped by outside observers.
In other words, it’s not that his being a government worker means we’re justified in jamming him into a negative pigeonhole; it’s that his being a government worker means he should be thoroughly familiar with how it feels to be so labeled without any other justification and that he ought to have known better than to turn around and treat somebody else the same way.
