Kootenay Crust

By Ian Cobb

In the good old days, when people could go an entire day without touching a telephone or be able to inform friends and followers that they had just consumed pizza and returned from the toilet, we got our news from newspapers, television and radio.

Professional journalists gathered stories by covering beats and facts were vetted. Editors and producers ensured factuality, clarity and conciseness and presented the stories to the public that were true, honest and earnest.

The craft of journalism, while always impacted by the mad rush to get the story out first, was something that was taken seriously and there always existed a pendulum balance between editorial and advertising. Journalistic integrity was just as important as advertisers and an eternal struggle existed in newsrooms.

As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, like a ragged cocaine addict handing their house keys to the bank, journalism began to change. The digital age was taking over and television’s immediacy forced the rise of tabloids, which had been rolling in dough in Britain for two decades prior.

Journalist integrity began to be eroded by tweakers; tabloid drones who had to make their stories more interesting by ‘bending’ the truth – as per orders of editors who were being whipped senseless by managing editors who, like Igor, did the bidding of “master.”

This trend rose from pressures above. Boards of directors leaned hard, presidents and vice-presidents scrambled to respond and before you can say Conrad Black is a complete wanker, journalistic integrity became an unwanted cost.

And then the digital tsunami washed over us all, catching many newspaper empires with their undies around their ankles.

This is where the story becomes interesting because this is where journalistic integrity returns to the front of the attack line, or at least should be.

Who remembers when television amounted to three or five channels? In some places in rural Canada, there was only the CBC and if the rabbit ears were working right, CTV, with the odd atmospheric conditions-influenced appearance of an American channel.

We garnered our information from very few sources – but we generally trusted them. We read books and whatever newspapers and magazines were available to us.

Now… humans obtain their information from a myriad of places; too many to even think about counting. In the vast majority of cases, the information being shared is not being gathered or vetted by professionals.

As a result, the digital seas are lousy with bobbing mounds of dung.

People have twisted senses of humour and that is roundly evident on the Internet. Unfortunately, many of these blogs or fake newspaper sites do a bad job of ensuring the reader knows they’re only ‘kidding’ or ‘tweaking like crazy’ or ‘full of crap.’

And a result of all that is the creation of a whole shwack of gibberish circulating the Internet and human gullibility, the sweet nectar that criminals suckle from our societies, leads to the spreading of a whole bunch of lies, whether humour or intended deception-based.

The ‘man’ is happy about that because it creates mazes into which truth seekers waste large volumes of time chasing nonsense.

A recent example of a bogus story being taken seriously revolved around an American Psychiatric Association (APA) report that stated people who take ‘selfies’ have a mental disorder called ‘selfitis.’

“The APA made this classification during its annual board of directors meeting in Chicago. The disorder is called selfitis, and is defined as the obsessive compulsive desire to take photos of one’s self and post them on social media as a way to make up for the lack of self-esteem and to fill a gap in intimacy,” reported the Adobo Chronicle.

When I read this, I laughed aloud and agreed with glee. Social media is awash with Selfies. It’s the new texting and driving. I read on, chuckling and believing.

“The APA said there are three levels of the disorder:

Borderline selfitis: taking photos of one’s self at least three times a day but not posting them on social media;

Acute selfitis: taking photos of one’s self at least three times a day and posting each of the photos on social media;

Chronic selfitis: Uncontrollable urge to take photos of one’s self round the clock and posting the photos on social media more than six times a day.

“According to the APA, while there is currently no cure for the disorder, temporary treatment is available through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The other good news is that CBT is covered under Obamacare.”

I stopped reading at that point and scratched my chin. My BS detector started to ring.

So I Googled the APA and immediately learned that the story is a hoax. Because I read the story via a Facebook feed, I didn’t read anything about the Adobo Chronicle, which notes on its ‘about page’ that it is “your source of up-to-date, unbelievable news. Everything you read on this site is based on fact, except for the lies.”

Unfortunately, a great many people don’t bother to check out sources and they swallow some pretty large pills of deception and cheek that are designed to zero in on gullibility.

Gullibility isn’t a mental disorder nor is a lack of curiosity or laziness, but those traits world-wide are allowing for the rise of an empire of lies, of the like old-time media could never imagine in its worst stupor of greed and shallowness.

I’m here to tell you – don’t believe everything you read in the mainstream media because media manipulation is a shadowy art practiced to perfection by many tweakers.

Yet media sources staffed by professionals are still your best bet to get the goods as straight as can be ironed. Trust me, I’m a journalist.

Now what did I do with my cellphone? I look particularly studly in my Sunday layabout threads.

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