Rob
« Previous Entries Next Entries »The Tumor Rumor: Evolution Of A Headline
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008So, is Patrick Swayze going to be dead in a month?
Some sources say yes, and quite a few people are getting up in arms about it. Here’s one article on the subject, taken from TransWorldNews:
Patrick Swayze Diagnosed With Cancer, Five Weeks Left to Live
Patrick Swayze, best known for his role in Dirty Dancing, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told that he has just five weeks to live.
Swayze, 55, has been sick with the disease since he was diagnosed in late January with pancreatic cancer. The cancer has since spread to other organs and now the actor/dancer is dying.
For the past month, Swayze has been traveling to Stanford University’s prestigious cancer center in Palo Alto for radical chemotherapy, but his doctors are no longer optimistic that the treatments will be successful, according to the National Enquirer.
Swayze received three treatments of chemotherapy, causing the tumor to shrink, but less than his doctors had hoped for. He was then told that he should prepare for the end.
For more people news, please check out http://news.finditt.com/NewsList.aspx?cat=14&wcat=16
Note the source. Yup, that’s right, The National Enquirer. The same ‘newspaper’ that rose to fame by printing stories of celebrities getting raped by Sasquatch and giving birth to alien children.
The difference this time is that other news sources are picking this story up and giving it publicity. They’re treating the Enquirer as a credible source.
Since when is the National Enquirer a trusted news source? Is it becoming more credible on its own or are readers just getting dumber? Is this now a reliable source of news?
I suspect that the reports of his limited lifespan are being greatly exaggerated. It just pains me to see the National Enquirer taken seriously by other news sources that are supposed to be credible.
UPDATE: Fox News is now reporting this story citing the same sources. Apparently they’re using the Enquirer as a credible source as well. Here’s the link:
UPDATE: Celebrity gossip hound Perez Hilton is now reporting on his website that this story is in fact true. He claims someone representing Swayze released a statement confirming his illness.
I’m finding this so fascinating because it just shows the evolution of a headline story. By tomorrow this will be all over the news, if in fact the confirmation is true.
UPDATE: People.com has revealed that the rumors regarding the actor’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer are true, but his imminent demise is not. Here’s the statement from his doctor as reported by People:
“Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment thus far,” Dr. George Fisher says in a statement. “All of the reports stating the time frame of his prognosis and his physical side effects are absolutely untrue. We are considerably more optimistic.”The actor’s rep adds: “Patrick is continuing his normal schedule during this time, which includes working on upcoming projects. The outpouring of support and concern he has already received from the public is deeply appreciated by Patrick and his family.”
And that, kids, is how the media works. I hope you enjoyed today’s foray into its inner workings. I guess the lesson here is this: Tabloids aren’t credible. They publish anything they can get in order for you to buy their publication. Thanks to some pretty resourceful folks on the internet, tomorrow’s issue of the National Enquirer which features the story of the Swayze’s battle for his life will sell far fewer copies as the truth has come out.
But don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to make light of Patrick Swayze or his condition. I actually like him as an actor, and have enjoyed many of his films. I hope he makes a full recovery. My purpose here was to use it as an example of how rumors spread because of the media. I was lucky to catch this one in its infancy stage, so I ran with it.
Is It Fair?
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008I read a few news stories earlier today about a group of Buddhist monks in Thailand who were using the internet social networking site Hi5 to lure women back to the monastery for sex. Some reports said they were raping these women, other reports say it was consensual so I’m not going to draw any conclusions about that.
I am going to predict, however, that these monks are going to be representative of the whole religion in the eyes of the unforgiving public. It seems like a trend nowadays that if someone who holds religious office does something immoral, the entire religion is blamed for it.
Take the Catholics, for example. The whole Catholic priest pedophilia scandal rocked the world when it was brought to light. Ever since the first allegations of this came out, the entire Catholic faith was put under a microscope and every single Catholic priest was under suspicion. I was raised Catholic, spent some time as an altar boy, went to a Catholic University and I can tell you first hand that I never witnessed any sort of misbehavior by a priest. I was never molested, nor did I hear of any other child I knew being molested by a Catholic priest.
In college I spent a lot of time with the Franciscan order of Friars. These were some of the most decent, moral men I had ever known and have known to this day. Never did I see one act innapropriately toward anyone else.
This same type of stereotyping is going to happen with the Buddhists now that this incident has come to national attention. Since the media likes to sensationalize everything, this is going to become a major scandal and the Buddhists are going to be treated as unfairly as the Catholics.
The reason it’s unfair is because members of any religious order who commit acts of immorality are singled out. There are a lot of sexual predators on this planet, but they’re not stereotyped like Catholic priests are because they come from all walks of life. There are literally thousands of registered sex offenders in the United States alone, and only a handful of those belong to any religious order. It can be safe to say that there are more sex offenders that belong to a particular race (whether that be Irish, Black, Hispanic, Polish, or whatever ; I’m not singling out an entire ethnicity because I’m arguing against stereotyping here) than there are Catholic priests who commit these offenses. There are probably more lay Catholic sex offenders than there are offenders in the clergy. But that doesn’t make national headlines because it’s not sensational enough.
Bring Back The Firing Squad Pt 2
Wednesday, February 27th, 200818 year old Ashley Clark was home alone, recovering from recent brain surgery, when the unthinkable happened. Two teenagers, a 16 year old male and 17 year old female, broke into the house intending to steal the car belonging to the homeowner.
When they were unable to accomplish the theft, they found the disabled girl and decided to take out their frustrations on her. They bound her, shaved her head, and beat her in the head with a baseball bat despite her pleas for them to stop because she recently had brain surgery.
These two wastes of air were found later that evening after they had left the scene, but Ashley had to be taken to the hospital where she’s expected to recover.
And watch, these two ‘misguided’ youths will be labled as victims. People will support them as they do every other scumbag in the world. I read blogs and posts all the time written by people who say that whatever psycho is being discussed was just a ‘lonley, lost soul who just needed a little love.’
You know what I say to those people? I tell them they need to be sentenced right along with the buttplugs they’re supporting.
These two kids weren’t just ‘misguided’ – they were sick. Pure fucking evil. No ‘human’ being would repeatedly beat on a disabled person who had just undergone brain surgery. No ‘human’ would beat on a disabled person to begin with. Any person who would do this is a lost cause and should be put away for life.
Here, read the article:
Teens Target Disabled Girl in Brutal Home Invasion
Yet Another Reason I’m For The Death Penalty
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008Take the case of Tracy Hermann and James Sargent of Peoria, Illinois. Their 5-month old son, Benjamin, was dropped off a their home strapped in his car seat. 8 days later, he was still in said car seat, on the living room floor, dead of starvation and neglect.
What was the reason for the neglect? Apparently Mom and Dad were too busy eating and playing video games to take care of their child.
Seriously, for 8 days this baby was strapped in a car seat, in a crib.
Sargent even admitted that he probably never even moved the kid for those 8 days. They just left him in his car seat to starve to death.
I say bring back the firing squad.
Shawn Lonsdale – Murdered?
Friday, February 22nd, 2008I was going to write a blog about this, but I found an excellent post regarding the death of Shawn Lonsdale on another site. I’m posting the link and the contents.
http://dreamsendweb.com/2008/02/19/suspicious-death-of-scientology-critic-shawn-lonsdale/
The following was taken from the blog “Dream’s End” which can be found by clicking on the above link.
For a brief time, Shawn Lonsdale, 39, was a fixture outside Scientology’s infamous Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida (the hotel in which Lisa McPherson died under the “care” of Scientologists). He was filming what he called a pseudo-documentary and stood for hours at a time gathering footage. He also posted frequently on various anti-Scientology discussion forums and was a well known activist.
He endured death threats and smear campaigns. He worked for a brief time in his younger days as a male prostitute, and flyers with this information were posted all over town. He was undeterred by these tactics. You can read more about him here. You can also see Lonsdale featured in a BBC documentary about Scientology, including a scene in which uberhandler Tommy Davis rushes onto the scene to make sure that reporter John Sweeney knows about Lonsdale’s minor criminal convictions. The link takes you to a compilation video of what Sweeney endured in filming his documentary. Lonsdale’s bit starts at around 2:45.)
And now, one week after the most widespread anti-Scientology action in history, he is dead from what police are calling an “apparent suicide.”
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