Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!nic.MR.NET!tank!kean
From: kean@tank.uchicago.edu (keane arase)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Is the news media really that stupid?
Summary: Here's my humble idea...
Keywords: ignornace, money, power, the usual stuff
Message-ID: <1116@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 9 Dec 88 21:08:48 GMT
References: <33065@bbn.COM> <4355@pbhyf.PacBell.COM> <5999@hoptoad.uucp> <1942@sigma.UUCP> <6023@hoptoad.uucp> <885@hdr.UUCP>
Reply-To: kean@tank.uchicago.edu (keane arase)
Distribution: na
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 48

In article <885@hdr.UUCP> eric@hdr.UUCP (Eric J. Johnson) writes:
[Previous Postings deleted]
 
>  For a start, I can see two reasons for this
>alleged occurence:
>
>    One: Ignorance.  News professionals do not know about USENET
>and bulletin boards, and if they did, they couldn't understand them anyway.
>
(Stuff deleted about how we flatter ourselves :-)
>
>    Two: Power.  The news professionals wield incredible power over people 
>through their control of the mass media.  People talking to each other
>limits the news professionals' power, and increases that of the average person.
>
(More reasonable argument deleted)
>
>Any comments?  Is there anything we can do about it?
>
>-- 
>Eric J. Johnson,  Amperif Corporation.  UUCP: eric@hdr.UUCP
>Perhaps, once upon a time, some Devilish hacker planted a bomb deep in the 
>human brain such that it would only trigger upon a certain thought passing 
>through the mind...  Perhaps this explains spontaneous human combu*****

How about this?  Give a major newspaper(s) a feed to usenet.  Let them
(or a particular reporter) run around reading the news.

I'm sure they will find:

1) a wealth of knowledgeable people,
2) a great source for diversified opinions
3) a gathering of people interested in a particular field (i.e. rec.guns,
   soc.*, macintoshes, ibm's, unix, etc.)
4) what this network is really about.

Agreed that a reporter using news may be inappropriate within the charters
of the net, but wouldn't that free up many confused or ignorant
conceptions about us?
--

Keane Arase, Systems Programmer
University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Acedemic and Public Computing, Technical Project Support
kean@tank.uchicago.edu
syskean@uchimvs1.uchicago.edu

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