Have You Or Anything You're Closely Associated With Ever Been Misrepresented In The Media?
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All of these are excellent responses. It just goes to show that the media very frequently gets it wrong. Whether intentional or not, we should all greet every story we read with great skepticism, because somewhere there's likely a person who could point out vast errors.
I wish that we could expect integrity in our media, but the fact is we cannot, as demonstrated here on this thread.
The president of a company I used to work for did a TV interview on a public broadcast station. Many people at the company were very complimentary the next day about how well he did in the interview. What they didn't know was that he had all the questions in advance. I knew because I was tasked with providing him one of the answers.
I have declined to give interviews to the media on several occasions. Nothing important, but I will never cooperate with the media while they hypocritically refuse to give interviews themselves.
In defense of local TV news, they only have time for a soundbite. You could give them a well thought out interview and in editing, only a brief few words is played if at all. However, which words are selected tell a story about the angle from which they wish to portray the story. Print news are famous for bold statement headlines while the facts are usually hidden near the end of the article. Gone are the days of indepth reporting of the facts.
My BIL got caught up in the Rodney King incident and the media crucified those cops. Showing the film of the cops beating over and over not how King charged at the cops to begin with. Well, you know the end there. Riots in LA, people killed, etc, etc. etc. Afterward, a jerk broke into the safehouse/prison the cop was being held at and killed a policeman and a prisoner not even related to the King incident. The cop they were after wasn't even there. That story was never reported in the press---oh it may have been on page 10 in a small paragraph.
I sometimes think the media should be brought up on charges for making news that in the long run end many lives.
To answer the OP's question, many times. Everything from health care to sporting events. Working in immunizatons, we learned to not respond to anything in the media b/c it just encouraged the anti-immunization people. The local press was always trying to present "both sides" to the point that they would print all sorts on crazy stuff. I used to report my kids' gymnastics meets to the local papers, and they generally screwed up a lot of stuff, even when I e-mailed or faxed the correct information to them.
I worked for many years for a large brokerage house on the trading floor of a major NY exchange. Journalists of all kinds were always buzzing around looking for stories or comments. We all wore name tags and even an innocuous comment like "I don't know" or "I can't talk about that" could be blown into a fiasco with your name next to it. You quickly learn to pretend they don't exist and leave any commentary to the firms PR division.
I, like many of you, am an avid reader of newspapers, editorials, magazines, journals, etc. In this age of 24-hour news coverage, its easy to get your fill of world events.
However, I greet each article with skepticism because I personally have been stung by media misrepresentation via misquoting and general out-of-context reporting on various subjects. To be honest, it's enough to make a person furious because there's very little in the way of recourse to correct the message. In most cases, it is what it is and you pretty much just have to settle for what was reported.
Most people view the media as having a bit of slant and bias, which breeds skepticism in and of itself. But I was wondering if any of you, or anything that you're closely associated with that you know the details and inner-workings of, have been misrepresented or misquoted by the media before? Did it help your cause? Hurt your cause? Or simply make you roll your eyes and distrust media even more?
Great thread Aero. I think that this is something that we can all identify with regardless of political affiliation. We've all been stung.
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