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When did reporting tacitly turn into reality? It was either always safe or never safe. What we considered it to be is what changed. It's this really insidious
by rriepe 7y ago
When did reporting tacitly turn into reality? It was either always safe or never safe. What we considered it to be is what changed.
It's this really insidious subtext of "What we tell you is reality."
- nathan_compton 7y agoOr they are just employing a figure of speech and everyone knows what they mean?
- mindcrime 7y agoIt's bad use of language no matter how you split it. I won't go as far as suggesting any kind of sinister intent or conspiracy theory, but the parent poster is right: it was either always safe, or it was never safe. There's no good reason not to report this using precise language.
- nathan_compton 7y agoI can't argue wit the fact that adding a "considered" to the headline would substantially improve its literal reading without impacting its readability.
- mindcrime 7y agoAgreed.
- rozab 7y agoI think it's a subtle anti-science attitude that pervades throughout society. "Next thing they'll be telling us apricots give us cancer! Those stupid scientists, eh?" When of course it's really the media itself to blame.
- rs23296008n1 7y agoEating apricots does cause cancer if there is enough remaining pesticide residue that hasn't been washed off. I also agree that most of the scare is media neglecting their public interest responsibilities in the name of sensationalism.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- peterwwillis 7y agoNo, it's people to blame. The reason people are anti-science is they don't like the idea that everything they know about the world can change regularly. The media are just the messengers.
- peterwwillis 7y agoReality is temporal and inconsistent. Reality changes as our perception of it changes, and we report on what we know today as reality. We don't report on what we think the reality has shifted from and to, just like we don't report on "our current flawed understanding of this subject leaves us with the following assumptions which we can only surmise are probably false based on our limited understanding of the world and how said understanding will change in the future". We assume that whatever we know today is a fact, because we don't yet know different, and everything that we knew yesterday wasn't a fact, because our understanding of reality has changed. Yesterday the alcohol was safe, because that's what we knew it was. Today the alcohol isn't safe, because that's what we know it is. That's how a human's understanding of reality works. So we report things in the same way.