Spotting bullshit in the news. Lesson #1

Journalists have made a pretty unsavoury name for themselves recently. These are some of the most influential people in the world so I thought I would give you a quick lesson in how they plant images and build stories through an exaggerated and carefully scripted narrative. Just one word in the wrong place can give a story a totally different feel. To avoid being influenced you need to be able to spot when they are doing it.


You can do this with almost any article on any tabloid newspaper in the country and dare I say the world. You can spot when a journalist has exaggerated or emphasised a certain aspect of the story to make it a more attractive read or in the most sinister cases control how you think or feel about a certain event, organisation or person.

In some cases they will use alternative words which may still describe a situation but altogether give the story a whole different feel, let me show you an example of how this works.


Let’s say that a footballer had been caught cheating on his wife with a 19 year old woman, "(Footballer) was caught having sex with a teenager by his wife of seven years." This is purely stating facts so there can be no conflict over the truth behind the story, although when written in plain english, the way that a news story should be, it sounds totally different. "Footballer cheated on his wife."


You may not realise the influence words like "Teenager" and"wife of seven years" have on the overall tone of the story and the way that you think of the people involved. The journalist establishes the footballer as a villain, and after all, a good story needs a villain and of course once you have established someone as a villian you can say and do what you fucking well please with them.


In the simplest terms possible it is bullshit, the picture that is being painted of this incident has been exaggerated almost to the point of fiction. It aims to get an emotional response from the reader rather than inform you of the facts. Certainly most newspapers are not going to outright lie to you but you need to be careful when forming an opinion about someone based on what they have written.

You may also think that footballers are pretty harmless villains, but when tricks like this are used when writing about politians or influencial organisations then it can directly influence someone into a certain way of thinking and in this day and age we need to have the freedom to make our own choices, otherwise we may aswel be sheep.


Beware, they could make the nicest man in the world seem on the same level as Joseph Fritzle by simply placing the right word in the right place.