Phelps Takes a Hit While Half of America Smokes

As the Ben Bradlee character says in the movie All The President’s Men, “We don’t report the truth. We report what people tell us.”

There is a distinction between national media and local media and print vs. broadcast vs. Web.

The national broadcast media will hype any fake story to get your attention and ratings. This also includes talk radio. The national newspapers have historically been better at getting closer to the truth, but in recent decades the sensationalism has taken over everything.

The local papers, however, are still stuck in the old “family newspaper” world and have a hard time getting anyone’s attention, because the conservatives they pander to for the sake of their corporate advertisers don’t read “liberal” newspapers, no matter how corporate, conservative they really are. Somebody should have put a muzzle on Rush Limbaugh a long time ago, but everybody wants to believe in free speech and the ability of the masses to figure how who is telling the truth.

But in the end we now know they can’t. They need to be led to the facts and have it hammered at them on a daily basis.

On the Web, with the proper supervision — and I’m not talking about untrained, unprofessional “bloggers” — we can get to the truth in a more wide open way that will still draw an audience. If we shout down and ban the zealots, that is, which is what we do here.

The right-wing attack machine (and some of their ostensibly lefty friends) do read us here, and they try periodically to get through the filter and bash what we are doing, because it doesn’t fit their unfiltered sense of what the First Amendment means.

There has to be an edited place on the Web that builds trust over time. That doesn’t mean we will get it right the first time every time. Everybody makes mistakes. But at least we try harder than most…

However, I also am disturbed by the double standard by the media. While they have run constant stories about this petty crap, they also have failed to display the diabolic hatred and animosity that they have shown towards other athletes in the past. I believe that the difference is due to race. If Michael Vick gets caught with MJ in a water bottle, the media (including sports media) talks nonstop about “role models” and “gang activity” and “gun violence” and other assorted and sundry non-related topics. (I’m no Michael Vick fan, but the MJ incident happened before the dog fighting).

Look at the difference here:

Column from Bleacher Report about Maurice Evans