This e-correspondence demanded to know why nobody was looking at the fact that Princess Diana's death had been faked, and that she was, in fact, David Furnish, the (apparently) male husband of Elton John.
You can see where the email's writer was coming from. After all, the resemblance is uncanny:
The email earnestly implored the targeted journalists to look closely into this staggering revelation, and concluded that if they didn't, they were obviously in on the whole thing, helping keep this terrible secret for... well... reasons.
Shockingly, nobody in the news media picked up on this bombshell. There were a few mocking tweets, and that's about as far as it went. The 'delete' key is a good news editor's best friend, and judicious use was made of it in this case.
This is an extreme example, but newsrooms are getting this kind of shit all the fuckin' time, and public email addresses become choked with conspiracy spam, and outright lunacy from the dedicated readers and listeners.
And when staff levels in newsrooms everywhere are being progressively decimated, and more and more actual journalism is demanded from those that remain, nobody has got any time for this dopey crap.
There have, admittedly, been some great stories that came out of the crank files, as a sharp-eyed editor spots a nugget of truth among the ocean of shit, and follows it to a thorough and proper conclusion. But this is an extremely rare occurrence, and happens less and less, as the amounts of emails and Facebook messages full of total horseshit continue to slide in.
For anybody who is keen to take this messy and complicated world, and give it a simplistic and explainable rationale, it's comforting that the real truth is out there, and is only being kept from the wider public by a sinister cabal of the media elite.
Maybe there is some weird shit going on at the highest levels of the media - noted piece of dung Rupert Murdoch has objectively made the world a shittier place through his fear-mongering and fascist-loving media empire - but there is no big conspiracy that everybody, from reporters on suburban newspapers to board members at media conglomerates, is involved in.
After all, journalists are an obviously contrarian lot, and newsrooms are full of people with wildly different opinions about anything and everything. You won't get four reporters in the same newsroom to agree on anything - deciding what to get when they're ordering a goddamn pizza on the late shift is hard enough, let alone a vast and terrible conspiracy spreading across the globe, lasting for decades, and motivated by... well, we'll get back to you on that one.
(Anybody going for the obvious answer that it's the money, the motive is always money, should take a look at the carpark of your local newspaper or radio station. Nobody on the take is driving those shitboxes.)
None of this is likely to convince the bloke, (and it's always a fucking bloke), who wrote the email about Diana and David. It's also extremely unlikely anybody ever bothered to reply, and they just let the mad, lone voice get lost in the cacophony. But nobody is covering up this crap, it's just a load of bollocks, and we don't have time to deal with that.
Then again, we would say that, wouldn't we?
- Ron Troupe
Posts
