My Introduction to the Lyin' Press


Posted On: Friday - July 12th 2019 8:57AM MST
In Topics:   TV, aka Gov't Media  Humor  Movies  Media Stupidity

This was long ago in a country far, far away .. from what it is now. However, the Lyin' Press was in some ways not a whole lot different than it is now. This was before the internet, when newspapers were still read, and the 3 major networks were still seen as The News on the fairly-new cable TV. Ted Turner's Cable News Network had been around already for a while, but I sure hadn't heard of it.

At the university in which I was partying studying, a big political figure (naming names would pin it down too much, sorry) was coming to give a speech. Some friends and I were being kicked out of our dorm rooms in the name of security. Yes, truly, just a decent shot with a rifle could have reached the speaker in question, much less a guy like this:



It's from a pretty good movie called Shooter. The star is Mark Wahlberg there.*

This was a dorm, not a private apartment. In the latter case, I'd have a REAL PROBLEM with being told to leave. I imagine the university had some rules about this unique situation, but I wasn't the type to check that sort of thing. This was just to be a couple of hours anyway.

See, here's the thing: My friends and I had no complaint about that. We liked the speaker, who was a conservative stalwart, and yes, even at that age, I was a Conservative. Leaving the dorms wasn't the problem - we wanted to SEE the speech, preferably close up! Since we were to be kicked out of the rooms, we thought we'd bargain with some university bureaucrat to end up with some passes to get into the area to watch, maybe up near the front even. It was only fair.

Somehow, the LLP (Local Lyin' Press) got wind of this - this was not NYC or LA, mind you, so there wasn't much else important that day, apparently. It was the first and only time I'd was ever been interviewed on TV, as far as I can recall, and I can sure recall this one. We all start off kind of naive, don't we, and I figured I'd give the lady my quick statement to explain, and that might get the dean-of-what-have-you to get off his ass for a minute and help a poor group of conservative students out.

I was on TV!: "Well, we are being kicked out of the dorms during the speech, so we want the school to give us passes to get up front and watch." Yep, the TV interviewer lady cut off the 2nd half of the sentence, making my meaning sound almost 180-degrees off. As I wrote, we ADMIRED this guy, but she changed my one sentence into simply a complaint. That's the story she wanted to tell, and it didn't matter exactly what I said. Of course, that slight edit was done later on, back at the station, so as we gathered around, probably with a few beers, to excitedly watch my important statement explaining our request, I ended up feeling a whole lot like Homer Simpson here:



(Look at the clock - hilarious!)

It's just a 30-odd year-old cartoon TV show, which, come to think of it, was not even quite on yet during the "episode" of this post, but yeah, the Lyin' Press was its evil self even that long ago. I'm glad I learned this fairly young though. Many of us don't. We'd all have been better taking Homer's advice at that point and finding a new life, under the sea!




* Sorry for the Arabic subtitles. a little worrisome, in fact! It's the scene I needed, and at least the "Shooter" talks to his dog in English. BTW, the character had talked about a 2,200 yard shot before this scene, but what he says here is "1,760's a mile ... a far piece ..." Even the one English number in the subtitle is wrong.

No, you wouldn't see the Dinty Moore stew can that well with the scope, whether it was 1 1/4 mile or 1 mile!

Comments:
No comments

WHAT SAY YOU? : (PLEASE NOTE: You must type capital PS as the 1st TWO characters in your comment body - for spam avoidance - or the comment will be lost!)
YOUR NAME
Comments