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18-07-2012, 07:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 18-07-2012, 07:42 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
A New York Times reporter has revealed the Obama and Romney campaigns are exerting major influence on the media by demanding editing power over quotes used in stories. In a front-page article, Jeremy Peters said journalists are largely acquiescing to demands by politicians and their advisers by allowing them to approve quotes before publication. Peters noted a White House practice of holding so-called "deep-background briefings" where reporters can paraphrase senior Obama administration officials but cannot identify them or quote what they say. He described how quotes collected from campaign officials and sent to them for approval before publication are often "redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative." Peters said it is "difficult to find a news outlet" that has not permitted officials to approve quotes, noting the Washington Post, New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters and others have all allowed it. Many journalists refused to speak to Peters on the record about the practice.
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Peter Lemkin Wrote:A New York Times reporter has revealed the Obama and Romney campaigns are exerting major influence on the media by demanding editing power over quotes used in stories. In a front-page article, Jeremy Peters said journalists are largely acquiescing to demands by politicians and their advisers by allowing them to approve quotes before publication. Peters noted a White House practice of holding so-called "deep-background briefings" where reporters can paraphrase senior Obama administration officials but cannot identify them or quote what they say. He described how quotes collected from campaign officials and sent to them for approval before publication are often "redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative." Peters said it is "difficult to find a news outlet" that has not permitted officials to approve quotes, noting the Washington Post, New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters and others have all allowed it. Many journalists refused to speak to Peters on the record about the practice.
In Britain, this is known as the "Lobby System", and it is a disgusting, anti-democratic, practice.
My view is that any journalist who works in the "Lobby System" should have their NUJ (journalistic union accreditation) card withdrawn.
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Agnotology is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt. ... Some of the root causes for culturally induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology
Media influence
The availability of such large amounts of knowledge in this information age may not necessarily be producing a knowledgeable citizenry. Instead it may be allowing many people to cherry-pick information in blogs or news that reinforces their existing beliefs.[SUP]
[18][/SUP]and to be distracted from new knowledge by repetitive or base entertainments. There is conflicting evidence on how television viewing affects intelligence as well as values formation.[SUP]
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An emerging new scientific discipline that has connections to agnotology is
cognitronics:
cognitronics aims (a) at explicating the distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information society and globalization and (b) at coping with these distortions in different fields... Cognitronics is studying and looking for the ways of improving cognitive mechanisms of processing information and developing emotional sphere of the personality - the ways aiming at compensating three mentioned shifts in the systems of values and, as an indirect consequence, for the ways of developing symbolic information processing skills of the learners, linguistic mechanisms, associative and reasoning abilities, broad mental outlook being important preconditions of successful work practically in every sphere of professional activity in information society.[SUP][URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology#cite_note-19"][20]
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"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
