CitronBleu wrote:They are terror acts, in that they are deeds which cause fear and grief. In this sense, they are real. When we deny this reality, we contradict ourselves.
Yes, that's exactly the problem. You've stated it more clearly than ever before, thank you.
The question from this understanding becomes how to approach the subjects now, in common dialogue with most people.
Seneca wrote:If I claim that something is fake I feel that I have to prove this. This obviously depends on my definition of "fake". For me this goes even farther than "not real", showing an intent to deceive. (but then you also need to know my definition of "deceive")
I hope this makes sense.
You should expound this. I see your point about having proof of
willingness to deceive, though this is (of course) very slippery because even people who habitually lie will weasel out of it when cornered. This is totally different from someone being asked to explain themselves from their own perspective, and journalism's practice is to
deliberately confuse the difference so that we must rely on their psychotic programming to learn who is or is not telling the truth.
Artificiality and construction of an image while claiming it is anything but, however, is a pretty good proof of some willingness to deceive on the part of a designer, even if it doesn't indicate who the designer is. (And, one wonders, why is there
such a lack of credits and citation on
every single news report? Possibly because of the number of stories of journalists being murdered for coming out with the truth. Is journalism as Psy-Opped as the rest of us? Possibly so.)
One thing I recommend that everyone finds is a basic "journalism" book given to students of "journalism" today. You will inevitably find a page (or a hundred pages, if you're lucky) on visual "ethics" which twists the meaning of photo manipulation in a number of bizarre directions. One book will tell you it's okay to modify things by "cleaning them up" so that a person is more
attractive, and another will say the rule of thumb is
anything that can be done in a traditional photo lab is perfectly fine (blatantly ignoring the fact that you could place the President on top of a flying grizzly bear and it would qualify as journalism under those rules).
They willfully ignore the psychological effect of lying to drive their pseudo-religion of "truthiness". Journalism is a problem, today.
And it's not the problem journalists themselves have been manipulated into barely elucidating if cornered.
The real issue is that
journalism does not have consistent ethos/ethics/morals and yet the very
training of a journalist in the school/industry/government department of journalism is that they are highly moral and respectful of others as long as they continue to annoy people in a particular way while ignoring the ethics discussion of their very practice.
It's a double standard to say that our own version of "journalism" (or annoying people with certain topics) is unacceptable but the mainstream and "alternative" ("indy" mainstream) way is perfectly ordinary, or at least is supposedly part of the best practices ever devised.
The whole discussion of what ethics means in the countless "ethics in journalism" dances is really about the ethics of a public existence. So them telling us we are not professionals or we are in the wrong for having a different approach to subjects is wrong of
them and totally contrasts with their own invented Political Correctness. And I think a reasonable court of law (sorry for any oxymorons in this entry)
allowed to look at the whole holistic picture (and not just a tiny sample under a narrow and obsolete framework) would agree.
I am not saying it's you doing it, either. I am just saying this is how we are trained to think.
'They are "professionals", therefore they can do what they want to everyone.'
at the same time !
