Yes It’s True: Search for quotes makes media lame

“Too many people with smooth on their tongues, filling their pockets with ‘I promise yous.” — An old Marathon gasoline radio ad,

“…it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” — William Shakespeare, from “Macbeth.”

“All hat and no cattle” an observation commonly used in Texas.

I learned very early in my sports writing career that perhaps the most overrated aspect in covering athletic events was quoting coaches and players. I came to understand that they rarely told the truth or provided insight.

I later came to understand that quoting people in the news was no better in providing the public with a better understanding of what was going on. In fact, too often, people being quoted are deliberately telling lies of manufacturing the news.

In this modern day of the “lame stream media,” the biggest problem that Sarah Palin overlooked is that there is an entire industry dedicated to telling us what corporations and institutions want us to know. It’s called public relations.

In sports, it’s often some joker with a microphone badgering an athlete immediately after a huge win or performance with the lame question, “How does it feel?”

One of the worst examples was provided by an overzealous husband presenting flowers to wife Jackie Joyner-Kersee after she won the heptathlon in the Olympics. She replied, “Not now, Bobby, I can’t breathe!”

The genteel beast, the clueless media makes herculean efforts to get meaningless quotes from mucky-mucks during or after a big event. If there’s a tornado or hurricane, they have to obtain comments from the President or the governor. Virtually all of them were prepared by public relations hacks, rendering them lame and unenlightening.

Whether the public wants to believe it or not, so much of what we hear from politicians is “just manufactured PR,” as charged by Monty Python comedian Eric Idle.

I used to camp outside the radio booth and wait for football and basketball coaches finish talking to the radio before I could get my leftovers when it occurred to me that what they had to say wouldn’t shed any more light on what I was about to write. So I stopped seeking out lame quotes.

I don’t understand why it’s so important for the lame-stream media to fetch precious but innocuous remarks from the man or woman in charge.

I lose my temper when I come to the conclusion that the CEO’s comments were manufactured, and even worse, carefully crafted and downright misleading. When the news isn’t good, the mucky-mucks do all they can to play it down and tell us everything is all right.

There are times corporations, their leaders and public relations hacks very simply are managing the news for us, making sure we only get to see or hear what they want us to. This happens most often in politics, and yet our elected leaders wonder why they are so unpopular.

George Orwell once said, “In a totalitarian society, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Even worse, telling the truth can help you to lose your job or lead to you being made into a pariah.

I’ve had experience in both of these in my sordid career as a community journalist. I might as well quote Jack Nicholson from the movie “A Few Good Men.” — “You can’t handle the truth!”