Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 19:34:41 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Spy plane crash?

At 05:58 PM 6/22/05 -0400, Elspeth Kovar wrote:
>At 04:06 PM 6/22/2005, Mike B. wrote:

>>. . . Since most of the public is woefully ignorant on the
>>subject, it would have been nice if the reporter had chosen to educate,
>>rather than mislead.  I did call the station about this, but they didn't
>>seem to think it was a big deal, and the same report aired again later that
>>day.  Personally, given the tone of reporting on gun legislation on NPR and
>>PBS over the years, I figure it was intentional.
>
>Or that communication moved slowly from a local station to whatever
>organization it was buying the report from.

It was the usual news reporter I heard on that station...as I said, I'm not
sure if it was from the local PBS station or from the NPR feed...they did
both.

> Or the organization didn't
>have clip of automatic gunfire but did have one of machine guns.

Automatic gunfire *is* machine guns...see what I mean?

Machine gun = fully automatic = automatic fire (for long guns like rifles).
 One trigger pull and it fires until you let go or it goes empty or jams.

semi-automatic = self-loading = semi-auto rifle or sometimes "automatic
pistol" (in slang use, since full auto pistols are usually referred to as
"machine pistols" and people are generally lazy.  Proper term is
semi-automatic pistol).  One trigger pull gets you one shot and an
automatic reload for the next one if the magazine (not "clip") isn't empty.
 You have to let go of the trigger and pull it again for that next shot
though.

select-fire = various fire modes from semi-auto to group shot (several,
usually 3, shots with each trigger pull) to full-auto.  Generally found
only on military weapons and restricted as machine guns under the 1936
Firearms act (or was that 1939?  I always forget that...).

If they didn't have a clip of the appropriate sound, and didn't have time
to go to a local range and tape some (and maybe get some interviews with
citizens while they were at it) they should have skipped the sounds
entirely.  If they hadn't had one of machine guns should they have run a
semi-auto pistol story with canons in the background?  It would be as
relevant.

>Or that, for some reason, they didn't find you believable.

I suggested that they could confirm what I was telling them with a call to
any gun store, gun manufacturer or military or police office.

>Meanwhile, some corrections to what you said and/or implied:
>
>Reporters very rarely chose the sounds that go with their reporting -- this
>is done by another area.

I called the station's news room (transfer from the main switchboard when I
told them why I was calling), not the reporter.  I would presume they'd
know who to contact about the problem.  If the reporter wasn't involved,
I'd hope he had something to say to whoever did pick the sounds that went
with his story, as his credibility was damaged by it.

>If it was radio it's likely that it wasn't PBS.  While some of their
>programs are heard on the radio they're developed for television; using
>background sounds is rare in reporting using a visual media.

I said NPR or the local PBS station...the local PBS station carried NPR
programming, but they also did some of their own reporting, mostly of local
stuff.  I'm not sure which this particular report was.  It was in the
morning, on one of the morning news shows....Morning Edition maybe?  Could
also have been one of the local shows or a news break from the national
feed.  It's been a while and I don't remember those details.  It was either
88.5 or the other one...90.9?  I think it was 88.5 but I wouldn't swear to
that at this point.

>Given that it was radio it could have been NPR.  It could also have been
>PRI, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, BBC, CBC, American Public
>Media, DW-RADIO, Minnesota Public Radio, Lichtenstein Creative Media or
>other independents, or a host of others.  (Although I doubt that The
>Parent's Journal did a report on guns they may have.)

I don't think they'd changed the name to PRI yet.  It wasn't BBC, or CBC or
DW-RADIO, or Minnesota Public Radio, or Lichtenstein Creative Media or the
others.  As I said, the reporter's voice was one I heard on the station
frequently, and few, if any, of those sources were on in the mornings.

>>They'd also be more believable in general if they didn't claim to be
>>commercial-free, yet run sponsor ads before most shows.  They don't run the
>>typical 30 second production numbers like on commercial TV, but they do
>>read commercials for the major sponsors...including the company name,
>>description of the business and their motto or tagline, and sometimes
>>contact info, such as a URL.
>
>A lot of people in public radio aren't happy with the increase of
>information in the sponsorship information.  On the other hand costs
>continue to rise, as they do everywhere, and funding has to come from
>somewhere.

Yep...so just quit claiming to be "commercial free".  If you have to run
some sort of ad to stay on, then run them, but don't keep claiming you
aren't. ("you" means the broadcasters here, not you personally of course).

>I notice that you deleted and entirely skipped something counter to your
>opinion:
>
>>>. . . I also know someone quite well whom reporters recently contacted
>>>for comment on something put out by the feds.  They not only got the
>>>quotes right, they got the sense of what was being said and when on to
>>>contact other people -- and got those right.
>>>
>>>Moreover, when something was said with a follow up of "That needs to be
>>>said but don't quote me on it" the reporter managed to very neatly get
>>>the information into the article without it being connected in any way
>>>with the person who said it.

I cut it not because it was counter to my opinion, but because it was
totally irrelevant to it.  I never said that reporters never got things
right, nor did I say that they didn't serve a useful purpose...so examples
that show them doing a good job aren't counter to anything I said.

I said that I was always skeptical of their reports since they were
sometimes wrong or misleading in my experience and I had no way of telling
when they were right and when they weren't unless I had direct knowledge of
the subject of the report (as I have in some of the examples I gave in
another reply).  See what you quoted from my prior message below for this.
Your point was trying to counter something I never claimed, so I ignored it.

>> >Yes, reporters get facts wrong, especially if the story is being done on a
>> >tight deadline.  Pity that you've used that to discount all information
>> >that comes from the news.
>>
>>If they are wrong some of the time, they aren't believable any of the
>>time...until confirmed.  Unless I already know about whatever the subject
>>of the report is, I can't know immediately whether this is one of the
>>erroneous or misleading reports or one of the good ones, so I'm skeptical
>>of all of them to some extent.
>
>By this logic, and by the test you applied in the examples you gave to
>Nicki, what you aren't believable any of the time.

That last sentence seems to have gotten mis-edited.  What were you trying
to say there?

I hope your whole point isn't that we should believe whatever the news
media decides to tell, us without question.  That would be foolish.
They've given awards to people who've overturned very large mis-reporting
by lots of news organizations, so it's not just my imagination that they
get it wrong some of the time...sometimes even most of them all at once.

Remember the child disappearance thing of about 25 years ago?  News
reporting all over the country was claiming huge numbers, tens of
thousands, even millions, of kids disappearing every year, tens of
thousands never being seen again and thousands of others turning up
dead...and it just wasn't true.  They created quite a panic (the term
"hysteria" was used later) until a couple of reporters (Diana Griego and
Louis Kilzer) eventually decided that with 50,000 dead in Vietnam and most
folks not being more than 2 degrees of separation from someone killed
there, if 50,000 kids a year were going missing *everyone* should know
someone who had lost a kid (the logic test I mentioned)..and they didn't
know anyone who even knew anyone who had lost a kid.  They started checking
with the FBI and others to find out what was up, eventually came up with
the right figures, published the story and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for
it.  The actual figures were that 95% or more of missing child reports were
due to runaways that came home on their own within a few days, most of the
rest were kidnappings by parents (custody issues), and only a relative few
(about 50) ended with a dead child, not the thousands that were being
widely reported.

There's an interview with Kilzer here:

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_072602_kids.html

This and some other often reported erroneous numbers are here:

http://www.stats.org/record.jsp?type=news&ID=412

A more scholarly evaluation of the situation might be found here:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1987.tb00307.x;
jsessionid=hX6Wuy7Qt6z4?cookieSet=1&journalCode=tsq

-- Mike B.
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