Tall Tales

[admenk]

"I was out riding with a friend and we were overtaken by a group of patched up guys So I waved to my mate to slow down from the 250k/h we were doing

Yeah, I was stuck in first gear...then I woke up

[MSTRS:Me]

Yeah, I was stuck in first gear...then I woke up

Bikes, man, bikes!! They no longer handheld gearshifts...

[Bender]

It leads me to wonder why the Hell I bother to read the newspaper. Everytime there's something mentioned with which you are intimately familiar you know they got it wrong, presumably therefore the rest is either inaccurate or incpmplete as well?

Sort of. If you can imagine an event, disaster, or whatever being a long tube. You take a slice out of the tube - that is the piece that the media sees. It reports on that snapshot in time and generally to the best of their ability.

If you are familiar with the subject, you will have a broader picture of what took place, and therefore a different perspective.

The media these days in NZ is dominated by the big Aussie companies. They have screwed down staff numbers and "streamlined" their operations. This has the effect of making the "slice of the tube" a lot smaller than previously.

In my day we had "roundsmen" who would be assigned to work on nothing else but, say the police, or the courts, or traffic, or the local council. Therefore their snapshot of an event was backed by a pretty thorough knowledge of what led up to it. Their contacts with senior people would be finely developed and the accuracy of information the reporter was getting would also be better.

It's all changed now and the rounds system is nowhere near as strong as it was - non-existent in a lot of key areas.

[Swoop]

And I started to wonder how much "artistic freedom" the tale teller allows him/her self when recounting something worth the effort.

At times when you read something on here it stares you in the face. Other times you just get that feeling that naaaahhh, probably not exactley how it transpired.

Just consider how much of the bible falls into this category.

[Gremlin]

tell it like it is... whats the point in anything else?