I’d like to start by sharing this item, which was the top-featured story in Google News this morning:
As you can see, various news outlets offered all manner of choices for us: would we like the fraud to be $12 billion? Or $27 billion? Or maybe even $44 billion?
This isn’t the case where, for instance, the fraud was $11.9 billion and some news organizations decided to simplify things and call it $12 billion. These are WILDLY different numbers. I frankly don’t care what the figure is, because the doings of Truong My Lan haven’t exactly been keeping me up at night. It simply reminds me of something that happened very recently.
See, a couple of weeks back, a news story appeared regarding a family member which was, in fairness, quite accurate. However, other news organizations took the same story and created their own stories from it, and it was sort of like the childhood game of “Telephone” in which the story being told gets changed and degraded with every passing. By the time the same basic story was being told (in places like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, etc.) it was completely off-the-mark.
In the few times I’ve been intimately acquainted with something newsworthy, whatever is reported in the media is a complete (and rarely intentional) distortion of the facts.
Sort of makes you wonder how much of what we read is true, particularly in cases in which there’s a vested interest in the public believing something that someone else WANTS them to believe.
