16 Dollar Muffin?

A 16 dollar muffin breaks out gossip in the media about spending of the Justice Department.


The media is bashing on the Justice Department saying it is an example of bureaucratic largess. The media though did not get the full story.


With the expense of 16 dollars the conference would receive variety of fruit, drinks and a muffin.


The media kept on writing gossip about the Justice Department without getting the full story. There were 178 false stories only 36 tried to set the record straight.


How can we rely on the media being correct these days? It seems that the media is just like a tabloid magazines by creating falsified and gossip stories.


Most of the false stories were out in the media before the Justice Department could explain the expense of the conference breakfast. This can be blamed on the technology advances in the world today because how fast the word can be spread.


Can we trust the media in telling the truth?

Media today will be false on occasion but if you frequently watch the news, the true will be told.

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Closet Scandal or Over-Blown Story?

As a journalist or reporter, sometimes your job requires you to reveal truths about skeletons in people's closets. Well what if that skeleton is literally you.

At the beginning of this week, journalist Scott Powers of The Orlando Sentinel was selected as the pool reporter for a private fundraiser for Democratic Senator Bill Nelson. Little did he know he would miss out on most of it.

Vice President Joe Biden was headlining for the fundraiser. His team decided that they did not want Powers mingling with guests before the Veep arrived. So according to various news sources on the internet, "they cosigned him to a storage closet - and stood outside the door to make sure he didn't walk out without permission; Scott Powers was locked in the closet for about 90 minutes and was only allowed to hear Nelson and Biden deliver their remarks."

This, however, is not completely accurate. I thought that this was a juicy story at first, but I rememberd what Brian told us about always checking facts, so I looked up this guy and actually found a story told from his perspective...

On his page at theorlandosentinel.com, I found out a little more of his side of the story and how it seems that this story has been blown out of proportion by the media. He quotes, "I was kidnapped. That's news to me... In fact, a lot of details circulating through the blogosphere --- and some mainstream media -- about my coverage of Biden's fundraiser visit last Wednesday were news to me."

"Take a couple details of information, toss them into the Internet and it can become like a child's game of telephone -- with each rendition adding spin and detail. Only in this politcally- charged environment, those spins and details can crystallize toward a scandal," says Powers.

I feel like that quote is extremely true. It's easy to take the first thing you see, or even the first few things you read and take them for truth, but if you actually dig deep you may find evidence on the contrary. This is another example where you always need to check your facts or you'll end up looking dumb in return when you're fooled by over-blown media stories.

Photo Credit: CreativeCommons, World Economic Forum.

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TMZ Punk’d Over JFK Photo

Celebrity site TMZ, fresh off its coup with its holiday-season grilling of Tiger Woods, flamed out like Icarus when it published what it called The JFK Photo That Could Have Changed History. Kennedy giving secrets to Khrushchev? Proof that Joe Kennedy bought his son’s contested election? A previously unknown photo of mobsters pulling the trigger on the Grassy Knoll?

Not quite. The photo, published on Monday, was of John F. Kennedy allegedly cavorting with nude women on a boat in the Mediterranean in the mid 1950s. Publication of such a photo, TMZ argues, might have derailed JFK’s 1960 presidential bid and changed, well, pretty much everything that's happened over the past 50 years.

Which, as Brian Stelter reports in the New York Times, would have been a great story. If only it had been true.

The trouble is that it wasn’t. The Smoking Gun debunked the photo later in the day, demonstrating that the photo was doctored from a spread that ran in the pages of Playboy magazine in 1967.

TMZ published a mea culpa later in the day, admitting that it had been taken in. What’s interesting is that TMZ claims to have vetted the photo through forensics experts and through two unnamed Kennedy biographers, who said they believed that Kennedy was on holiday in the Mediterranean around the time the photo was allegedly snapped (and about the same time that future first lady Jackie Kennedy was miscarrying their first child — but that’s another story). So why did it take The Smoking Gun only a matter of hours to expose the photo as a fake?

The incident shows the dangers of using unnamed sources, dubious photos and (perhaps) wanting so badly for a story to be true that it opened itself to attack from other media. When a story’s too good to be true, many times it probably is.

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