Whitewash, Black-Hat, Red Rage
I had to drag my sorry carcass home early on account of hideous migraine of the "can't see straight, can't focus on anything, can't stand light or noise of any kind" variety. It's not 100% gone but it is well enough that I can sit up and check on what's going on in the world.
Yeah, that was a bad idea for my continuing mental health. Check out the puppet show! Seriously, I know Fox News has never exactly been even remotely on the scale of 'unbiased reporting' but I really didn't think that anyone was going to be so blatant about whitewashing and otherwise obfuscating the truth of matters. First of all, they're trying to make hacking in general out to not be a big deal. Talking about how Citibank and AmEx got hacked and no one made a huge deal over that. Yeah, that would be because they got hacked, whereas News of the World did the hacking. Yeah, Sony got hacked too, but there's a bit of a difference between some black hat digging up user ID and a 'trusted' publication hacking into the voicemails of 9/11 victims and murdered teens ... that's even leaving aside where they deleted voicemail messages from said murdered teen's inbox, not only interfering in a criminal investigation but giving her family hope that she was alive ... all for the sake of some other story to dump into their rag of a newspaper to sell more copies.
While part of me is angry about this in general, and for good reason ... I'm also looking at it from the other side, which is ... well, how much of this is our fault as a society? Look at what actually sells papers. I mean, I personally don't give a shit about the pictures of Posh and Becks' baby and what they decided to name her, but so many do. So ... yeah, people want their celebrity dirt, and newspapers with no morals will go to any lengths to get it. I don't think that even celebs deserve their privacy violated in that way, but I do understand why in the case of celebs, because it sells papers. That kind of thing is dirty and disgusting but it is giving the public what it wants. From there, how much of a step is it to do the same thing to the general public, when the story is juicy enough, as in the case of 9/11 and Milly Dowler? From society's general tendency towards gossip came shit like this. The general public does not want to face this, so it forms the modern-day equivalent of a lynch mob. Which in a way is good - it means this won't get swept under the carpet the way so much fuckery tends to be these day. On the other hand ... can someone please just admit that when the stories spawned by these things were coming out, most of the people raving about what shit the News of the World pulled were eating up the results of said shit?
But leaving all that aside ... if you're going to use your vast media empire to whitewash the sins of the one bit of your vast media empire that got exposed committing said sins, it might be an idea not to be so blatant about it. I don't know that this is a deliberate attempt by Murdoch to whitewash - I don't know how much say he has over exactly what's said at any given time - but shit, if I were Murdoch, I'd be sacking both of these guys. The last thing you want to do when everyone is pointing fingers at you and questioning a) your journalistic integrity, b) your morals and c) whether you should be allowed to get away with this shit without losing the huge chunk of media voice you've accumulated over the decades is to so blatantly have bits of your media empire saying, "Oh, look at poor Mr Murdoch! Why can't everyone just leave him alone! News Corp is the victim here with everyone dogpiling on them! And who cares what happened in London a decade ago anyway?" Because that's too obvious and is just going to get more people pissed off and boycotting, your shares will drop further and your media empire will go to hell. Everyone is watching now. Watching and judging and your market share and influence are seriously at risk.
...On the other hand, no, carry on. I want to see the Murdoch empire crash and burn.
We still don't know what's going on with Schrodinger's Admin yet. Office manager was away all last week and while she's said that she doesn't want Schrodinger's Admin back in the department, she hasn't received confirmation from HR that Schrodinger's Admin will be kept away from the department. And Schrodinger's Admin wasn't even in today, despite the fact that her two-week sign-off for illness or stress or whatever is over now. I don't know what I'll be going back to tomorrow but it's yet more stress I don't need. I just wish this were over, one way or another. I'm tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop and I'm really tired of having a department but no desk.
Beyond that, I suppose there's not much new. It's hard for there to be new, I guess, when I spent most of the day in bed with the duvet over my head, in pain and singularly miserable. Another sleepless night (insomnia tends to come over me on a Sunday night, when I'm faced with the start of another week of the Schrodinger's Admin issue) combined with sinus problems caused by the change in the weather and the stress itself? Well. Feh. Though at least I'm probably feeling okay enough to beat the shit out of something in Warcrack to vent some of the stress, maybe. Or maybe I'll go mining; I need more copper and resent paying auction house prices for it. Still, not sure I want to go wandering around Tirisfal Glades, however good it is for mining. Every time I turn around, there's a PvP event in Tirisfal Glades and Undercity where a bunch of Alliance high levels attack the place. I keep myself set to PvE only but there's no way I want to get into this by accident again, like I did last time. Not when a Hunter's pet will beat me senseless in two hits and then /dance on my corpse. Literally.
Still, again, loving Prot spec. The whole Avenger's Shield thing is pretty frickin' awesome. It's like being the Azeroth version of Captain America. *g*
Yeah, that was a bad idea for my continuing mental health. Check out the puppet show! Seriously, I know Fox News has never exactly been even remotely on the scale of 'unbiased reporting' but I really didn't think that anyone was going to be so blatant about whitewashing and otherwise obfuscating the truth of matters. First of all, they're trying to make hacking in general out to not be a big deal. Talking about how Citibank and AmEx got hacked and no one made a huge deal over that. Yeah, that would be because they got hacked, whereas News of the World did the hacking. Yeah, Sony got hacked too, but there's a bit of a difference between some black hat digging up user ID and a 'trusted' publication hacking into the voicemails of 9/11 victims and murdered teens ... that's even leaving aside where they deleted voicemail messages from said murdered teen's inbox, not only interfering in a criminal investigation but giving her family hope that she was alive ... all for the sake of some other story to dump into their rag of a newspaper to sell more copies.
While part of me is angry about this in general, and for good reason ... I'm also looking at it from the other side, which is ... well, how much of this is our fault as a society? Look at what actually sells papers. I mean, I personally don't give a shit about the pictures of Posh and Becks' baby and what they decided to name her, but so many do. So ... yeah, people want their celebrity dirt, and newspapers with no morals will go to any lengths to get it. I don't think that even celebs deserve their privacy violated in that way, but I do understand why in the case of celebs, because it sells papers. That kind of thing is dirty and disgusting but it is giving the public what it wants. From there, how much of a step is it to do the same thing to the general public, when the story is juicy enough, as in the case of 9/11 and Milly Dowler? From society's general tendency towards gossip came shit like this. The general public does not want to face this, so it forms the modern-day equivalent of a lynch mob. Which in a way is good - it means this won't get swept under the carpet the way so much fuckery tends to be these day. On the other hand ... can someone please just admit that when the stories spawned by these things were coming out, most of the people raving about what shit the News of the World pulled were eating up the results of said shit?
But leaving all that aside ... if you're going to use your vast media empire to whitewash the sins of the one bit of your vast media empire that got exposed committing said sins, it might be an idea not to be so blatant about it. I don't know that this is a deliberate attempt by Murdoch to whitewash - I don't know how much say he has over exactly what's said at any given time - but shit, if I were Murdoch, I'd be sacking both of these guys. The last thing you want to do when everyone is pointing fingers at you and questioning a) your journalistic integrity, b) your morals and c) whether you should be allowed to get away with this shit without losing the huge chunk of media voice you've accumulated over the decades is to so blatantly have bits of your media empire saying, "Oh, look at poor Mr Murdoch! Why can't everyone just leave him alone! News Corp is the victim here with everyone dogpiling on them! And who cares what happened in London a decade ago anyway?" Because that's too obvious and is just going to get more people pissed off and boycotting, your shares will drop further and your media empire will go to hell. Everyone is watching now. Watching and judging and your market share and influence are seriously at risk.
...On the other hand, no, carry on. I want to see the Murdoch empire crash and burn.
We still don't know what's going on with Schrodinger's Admin yet. Office manager was away all last week and while she's said that she doesn't want Schrodinger's Admin back in the department, she hasn't received confirmation from HR that Schrodinger's Admin will be kept away from the department. And Schrodinger's Admin wasn't even in today, despite the fact that her two-week sign-off for illness or stress or whatever is over now. I don't know what I'll be going back to tomorrow but it's yet more stress I don't need. I just wish this were over, one way or another. I'm tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop and I'm really tired of having a department but no desk.
Beyond that, I suppose there's not much new. It's hard for there to be new, I guess, when I spent most of the day in bed with the duvet over my head, in pain and singularly miserable. Another sleepless night (insomnia tends to come over me on a Sunday night, when I'm faced with the start of another week of the Schrodinger's Admin issue) combined with sinus problems caused by the change in the weather and the stress itself? Well. Feh. Though at least I'm probably feeling okay enough to beat the shit out of something in Warcrack to vent some of the stress, maybe. Or maybe I'll go mining; I need more copper and resent paying auction house prices for it. Still, not sure I want to go wandering around Tirisfal Glades, however good it is for mining. Every time I turn around, there's a PvP event in Tirisfal Glades and Undercity where a bunch of Alliance high levels attack the place. I keep myself set to PvE only but there's no way I want to get into this by accident again, like I did last time. Not when a Hunter's pet will beat me senseless in two hits and then /dance on my corpse. Literally.
Still, again, loving Prot spec. The whole Avenger's Shield thing is pretty frickin' awesome. It's like being the Azeroth version of Captain America. *g*