the timboucher experience

I just found a pretty decent quote from an article called The Conspiracy Virus And How Media Tries to Prevent It. The title of the article is better than the actual content for the most part. But there is an interesting section; it goes:

Investigative reporting, as I understood it at the time, was supposed to serve as a check on the abuse of power. Exposure of misdeeds was a way of reigning in the powerful.

But in the corporate media, “investigative reporting” too-frequently targets people without much power. A hidden camera follows garbage collectors and meter readers, catching them in the act of taking long lunches, visiting their girlfriends and other heinous acts of “wasting your tax dollars”; that type of story. But most tax dollars are not wasted by lazy municipal employees, but by their bosses and thier bosses’ bosses, and the corporate welfare gravy train. Corporate crimes are not committed by workers on the assembly line, but by wealthy executives.

This is a great observation. I have a friend who works for the city schools here doing maintenance. So he’s a public employee essentially. He always talks about how there’s this ridiculous “investigative” news guy from one of the local tv stations, Andy Sheehan, who every few days comes down and follows their trucks around. He’s basically just trying to get footage of them slacking. It’s fucking retarded. Imagine some dickwad news guy followed you around your office while you were trying to send emails to your girlfriend. Well, actually, I guess they have tracking programs that can do that for them, so they don’t even need news guys to do it. Anyway, it’s just such a ridiculous cat & mouse game that encourages and continues a culture of distrust.

• Investigative Consumer Reports
• More like investigative jackass, I’d say
• Russian Exorcism Video
• The investigations are underway
• Shadow People