I am a recording engineer.

I take beautiful sounds, voices, pianos, stringed instruments and the like, pump them into microphones where they will eventually arrive to loud-speakers to deliver a facsimile of the original sound to your eardrums, which will in turn, vibrate your oscicles ( the bones of the middle ear ) transferring that, then to your inner ear and to the auditory cortex of you brain and you'll hear something that reminds you of a voice, or a piano, or stringed instruments.

Loud-speakers are cones in boxes. They cannot duplicate the sound of a Steinway, or a voice, or a stringed instrument. The term "Hi-Fi" short for "High Fidelity", implying a reproduction of sound that is "highly faithful" to the original, is a euphemism for "sounds pretty good".  Your playback of that CD or tape is an exercise in deception.

I have been accused so often of being a "master engineer" that I have succumbed to entering a plea of "guilty".  This makes me a master of deception.  It is with this credential plus an audit of "Journalism 101" and "Psychology 101"  that I shall attempt to discuss the topic of slanted journalism or "Lo-Fi news".

Observe and read the following article, reprinted here without permission, so I can't register copyright on this piece either.

Pretty straightforward so far.  Next came the sub-heading or "lead-in":

Now it gets interesting. You see what it says.   Notice what it doesn't say.   For instance, it doesn't say "murder" like "2 adults murdered." Murder is a hot word, one that implies guilt.  The writer didn't want to bring the concept of guilt into this.  This journalist wants this incident to be nobody's fault.   It says,

-- not something like, "several kids, just like yours, had their arms and legs blown off."  WHOA!  That would be way too violent.  Too close to home.  Just isn't done.  But then, gentle reader, which gives you a more accurate feeling as to what went on there?  "Hi-Fi" is about accuracy.  So is journalism.

Hang on.  There's more:

There's a Key-word and a Hot-word here.  The hot-word is 'armored'.   Now ask yourself, 'why the armor?'  Did you send your kids off to school this morning in an armored bus?  Why the armor?  Yeah, by now we know why their school buses are armored.  But do see how easily that term can slip by?  You're used to it.  Those kids aren't.  Then there's the phrase "settler's children."  In the current media bend, "settlers"  are 'the bad guys,'  the ones who are where they don't belong.  No matter that the country, in its entirety, is still theirs. "Settlers" is a key-word.  Did you feel any heat with the word "armored"?   I do !   But then, I'm a master of deception, I must know the difference between the "live and the Memorex".

Let's go on.  The article said:

Sounds a bit heavy.  Probably was.  Gives me the impression that they smacked the place to smithereens!  Very effective imagery.  Subtle.  Did you get that image too?  But look, they

What, only TWO?!? All that bombardment...man, when I read that I thought of the blitz in WW2 London!  Just two seriously injured.  Something wrong with the picture here....like too much bass boost on Beethoven.  Sounds real big, but a bit phoney.  (Where did that word come from, "phoney"...could it have been from the way a voice sounded on the early telephones, unrealistic?  Phoney?)

Francis Scott Key all over again....but the rockets there were from the bad guys, right?.....Oh, they're good at the way they wrote this article up.  They made it sound like London and Vietnam in stereo!  Only two injured....guess the Israelis were pretty lousy shots, huh? Or were they?

Don't you love the drama of that?  They "plllluuuunnnnggged into darkness"!  Splasho!  wowee!

And it...

Aren't you just terror stricken when the lights go out?  There's another one of those hot-words, "panic", read "terror" in this neck of the desert. That makes the Israel Defense Forces the terrorists, doesn't it?

Yeah, that phrase adds to the image of rockets and bombs going off in crowds of people.  Very effective.  But is it accurate?

One thing they didn't write, and I know this to be true because two of my friends know people who were there.  The teacher was a mother of four. The maintenance man, the father of six.  A good friend of mine knows the father of one of the girls who had her legs blown off, the kid had been invited to his daughter's Bat Mitzvah.  Another friend also knows a parent of a little kid who suffered that fate. Maybe its the same kid.  Does it matter?  I think it does. And I think it's worth telling it like it really is.

Oh, one last thing.  That bus, that armored bus, was definitely a densely populated area.

So now, was it live, or was it Memorex?  Was it real, or was it phoney?  Hi-Fi or Lo-fi?  You tell me.  Do you feel differently about the story after I shredded it?  Or did the deception work?