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Showing posts with label Corporate Media. Show all posts

Monday, March 19, 2018

The Aftermath Re The Pentagon’s UFO Study: Corporate Media Sitting on Their Hands

Newsweek mails it in

As a card-carrying member of the mainstream media, De Void derives little pleasure from ragging on colleagues when they mail it in on what will eventually prove to be the greatest story of our time. Yeah, snark can be fun, especially with a field so target rich. But it’s not much of a challenge these days. Mostly, it’s just sad to see how vulnerable the MSM really is when it feels compelled to play catchup with those The Truth Is Out There stories. One of the most wretched examples of our industry failure happened in 2015, when the press made a lemming dash for 50-year-old “top secret” public record government UFO files, and screwed up almost every aspect of it. Good thing there were no consumer safety ramifications.

By Billy Cox
De Void
3-7-18

So it’s going on nearly three months since The New York Times yanked the curtains off the Pentagon’s now-famous UFO study, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. And here we are, corporate media, sitting on our hands again, waiting for the Times or somebody else to run with the ball. Every now and then, on rare occasions, a pulse does twitch the EEG needle. Like last week, at The Fader magazine, when reporter Kelsey McKinney did a little homework and actually tried something different. She picked up the phone. What she came up with was an original Tom DeLonge angle — and one so obvious that nobody thought of it.

Here’s a rambling version of the setup:

How, exactly, does the former Blink-182 front man whose interviews make “less sense than the 40 ‘na’s’ strung together in the chorus of ‘All the Small Things” – a guy whose tales of secret rendezvouses with governmental techno-luminaries sound like, in McKinney’s words, “a conspiracy theory on steroids” – manage to coax some of those same folks off the sidelines to become board members of a still somewhat amorphous corporation called To The Stars Academy?

Well, according to The Fader’s premise, maybe it’s as simple as appealing to wonks who’ve nursed life-long rock-star aspirations of their own. True or not, it’s worth a read.

Anyway, that story is an exception. And last week’s oblivious puff piece by Newsweek more accurately reflects corporate journalism’s status quo. It had a provocative title, “What UFO Encounters Can Tell Us About Fake News and Climate Change Denial,” but even that sounded vaguely familiar. In September, The Atlantic Monthly ran excerpts of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, in which Andersen described public “belief” in UFOs as a cornerstone of our widespread delusions.

Newsweek reporter Meghan Bartels approached a historian and University of Pennsylvania doctoral candidate who’s been combing through the old Project Blue Book records for a dissertation. Researcher Kate Dorsch is calling it “Reliable Witnesses, Crackpot Science: The UFO Cold War in America.” On Penn’s site, Dorsch says her “project will also consider current issues in American anti-scientism as they present themselves today, including climate change denial and the anti-vaccination movement, while asking ‘Is UFO belief and study truly anti-science?’ (Currently, she would say no!)”

Bartels had a chance to get Dorsch to put those informed perspectives – along with Dorsch’s intriguing working conclusion – in context with the Pentagon’s $22 million UFO study. That might really set Newsweek up for a decent essay. Instead, Bartels stays in the shallow end and equivocates about “the division over what constitutes authority,” a phrase she uses twice. Sounds like a deadline flub. Hellooo, I need that UFO piece yesterday — hellooo! But if you want to know how this blown opportunity occurred, just look at how Newsweek has been handling this AATIP thing.

Since mid-December, the online version of the formerly relevant weekly has published at least eight pieces on the Great Taboo, all but one of which – Bartels’ submission last week – merely summarized all the other stories. Newsweek’s 12/17 article is a rehash of the Times’ AATIP coup. Newsweek’s 12/18 followup regurgitated the Times and the New York Daily News. On 12/19, Newsweek condensed the reporting of CNN, the Times, and the Washington Post without adding a lick of original material.

On 12/20, Newsweek trolled CNN’s interview with America’s celebrity astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and came up with this clever lead: “Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t give an F about all this UFO talk.” OK, what about a D-minus? Anyway, at least this story made a pretense of trying to perform due diligence by throwing in this line: “The White House did not answer a request for comment from Newsweek” about whether or not President Trump would renew AATIP’s funding. Yay.

On 12/24, Newsweek relied exclusively on the Daily Telegraph’s profile on former AATIP director Luis Elizondo to fill the hole. On Christmas Day, it rewrote a Hollywood Reporter story on director Guillermo del Toro’s long-ago UFO sighting. And on 12/29, Newsweek rewrote an interview MIT radio astronomer John Ball gave to Science Alert.

Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with rewriting news stories so long as you provide sourcing; De Void wouldn’t be blogging today if it weren’t for other people doing the work. News aggregators have their place, I guess. But the most telling aspect of Newsweek’s UFO coverage is, the eight stories mentioned above have seven different bylines. How might that affect the big picture? Hm. One thing it means is that one poor reporter drew the short straw twice. Sorry, kiddo, it’s either that or mop the floor.

De Void suspects Newsweek could manage its online sausage factory more efficiently. For starters, why pay part-timers and freelancers to expectorate cold UFO hash that everybody already knows about? Why not assign them to something with a little more cleavage, like the Stormy Daniels beat? That’d be monster traffic, man.

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Thursday, November 17, 2016

Ufology: Corporate Media Blew Its Most Promising Opportunity

The media disgrace

Ufology: Corporate Media Blew Its Most Promising Opportunity

"...corporate media blew its most promising opportunity — ever — for instigating a policy-level discussion of The Great Taboo..."

Two tantalizing developments in late October, just days shy of the most demoralizing U.S. presidential campaign in the history of the world:

1) Using NASA data, a journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Science announced it had calculated that more than 8.8 billion Earth-like planets inhabit the Milky Way galaxy alone. Which is depressing enough. But also: 2) Another journal, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, identified 234 stars amid a survey of 2.5 million in which light-pulse signatures were consistent with

By Billy Cox
De Void
11-10-16

theoretical models predicting extraterrestrial intelligence. The second item is far more speculative and controversial than the first, but the confirmation of either would turn our conceits upside down. Or at least we wouldn’t have to resign ourselves to the idea that the way we do things in this joint is as good as it’s ever going to get.

Nope, unfortunately, UFOs haven’t destroyed Capitol Hill or the Kremlin, and De Void is not back. But after seeing how corporate media blew its most promising opportunity — ever — for instigating a policy-level discussion of The Great Taboo, it’s difficult to sit back and pretend we’re not in very deep trouble, and on such a fundamental level. Market-tested and auto-programmed for parroting trivia, fear and anger, the Fourth Estate appears to have also severed its links to those things that can evoke the best of who we are or hope to be.

I used to follow crowds of visitors onto the banks of the Indian River Lagoon and the beaches of Cape Canaveral, where they converged for the countdown to shuttle launches and planetary missions, most of which rarely made their deadlines. But no matter. Taking expensive chances with the weather and the inevitable hardware glitches, they rolled in from everywhere, from around the world, pickup trucks, RVs, lawn chairs, binoculars, bug spray, SPF50, coolers, Coleman grills, lanterns, campfires, tripods, radios, you name it, they packed it. And it wasn’t just to watch — they could’ve tuned into network coverage for that, and with a lot less aggravation. They came to participate, to be a part of something that reduced to irrelevance whatever affiliations that divided them, even if they weren’t aware of it. And they were united by storylines that generated parades of firsts:

First woman astronaut, first black astronaut, first teacher, first Saudi, first Israeli, first American in orbit giving it another shot to see if his 77-year-old bones could withstand, 35 years later, the rigors of space flight. There were multi-ethnic multi-racial shuttle crews fulfilling Gene Rodenberry’s “Star Trek” prophecy. There were astronauts pushing back against skittish administrators, demanding a chance to risk their lives to fix a failing telescope renowned for peering into the edge of time. There was the 96-year-old widow of the astronomer who discovered Pluto, on hand to watch an unmanned craft programmed to deliver, among other things, her husband’s ashes to that unimaginably distant world.

These stories fueled pilgrimages. And the entire planet joined the learning curve, sometimes in horror, learning to exhale only after solid-rocket boosters cleared the fuel tank 90 seconds out. On the high frontier, death is the ultimate price of knowledge; yet, the waiting list to engage that voyage swells. And it has been this way since the first crazy people hopped into hollowed-out logs and splashed off for nothing more than invisible hunches and theories on treasures their faith said lay waiting beyond the horizon.

Walter Cronkite once said history will look back on America’s Apollo moon program as the 20th century’s crowning achievement; indeed, 50 years later, the study of the neurological shading that occurs when space travelers gaze upon Earth — called the “Overview Effect” — is only beginning. But Cronkite’s sensibilities were nowhere in evidence during the presidential debates. There were 27 national stage-managed auditions during the campaign of 2015-16, and unless I missed something, not a single journalist bothered to solicit a candidate’s vision for space, the arena in which the U.S. and Russia are indispensable partners. Not a one. In fact, after securing their party’s nominations, neither Trump nor Clinton could find room for a website blurb on NASA policy. But you can bet your ass those two would’ve dashed off something, no matter how cynical or meaningless, had a single member of the press stepped up to ask about it in a public forum.

Which brings us to journalism’s great lost moment. Let’s do this again:

For the first time ever, a monopoly-party candidate attempted to post UFOs on the Beltway talkboard. With persistent nudges from campaign director John Podesta, Hillary Clinton on three separate occasions showcased not only a conversational grasp of the phenomenon but also a rhetorical willingness to pursue the issue wherever it led. All three statements rated dutiful cut ‘n’ paste coverage worldwide. But not a single major daily or network or public radio station had the guts, or the foundational knowledge, to ask HRC why — exactly — she was so interested in broaching such a politically radioactive topic. It made no sense, tactically or strategically. It was a baffling non sequitur, with no moneyed momentum to propel it. Where were the payoffs? Who was the audience? It was intended to be a counterweight to — what?

Well, given how no news division or editorial board saw fit to mention our once-bejeweled space program, their failure to confront Clinton with her counterintuitive UFO remarks was at least consistent. And as a final kick out the door, Esquire magazine’s snark over the Podesta/Clinton gamble, published two weeks ago, mirrored the prevailing media tone over the last 11 months: “Cracking the Crackpot Vote — How do you win over true believers (in extraterrestrials) in an election this crazy?” If you were too stupid to get it, the editors punched it up with an illustration of HRC sitting on a flying saucer shooting a laser beam from its belly.

Someday, these presentations will be compared with what “Reefer Madness” did for marijuana laws. For now, what is truly unforgivable is journalism’s demonstrated inability to revitalize rigorous inquiry into whatever may be waiting for us out there, conventional angles or otherwise. Even as the universe grows more crowded, more vivid and more complex with each flip of the calendar.

Like an amoeba, our species assumes its definition not at its middle, but at its leading edges, at the margins, where it decides to go next. If we’re losing our capacity for awe — not to mention an appreciation for the human ingenuity required for translation — let’s start calling out the usual media suspects. Clinton-Trump ’16 flagged an opportunity for institutional journalism to explore documentation it has never properly addressed, to make a different kind of history, no matter who won. And like a streak of summer lightning, that moment flickered and vanished. It’s already almost like it never existed.

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See Also:

The UFO Cover Up and Manipulation of The American Media

'CIA X-Files' and The Ongoing Mainstream Media Faux Pas

Media Coverage of UFO Phenomena Found Lacking