I've come to the point when I recognize "planting" of stories on the news. "Planting" generally means....something isn't really news but it's been dragged out for public relations and suppose to smear someone or some organization.
This morning was an interesting piece. I read the German "FOCUS".....a weekly national news item, which is updated every twenty-four hours online, and for anyone to read. If you want the absolute full story.....you have to go out and buy the magazine itself.
So I'm in the middle of the top twenty stories of the day related to German society, and suddenly, here's this Hillary Clinton story. I figure ok.....has to be over the book or some piece of the book she's recently published. No.....it's over the fact that Chelsea Clinton, and the suggested fact that she's not Bill Clinton's daughter.....which then goes into a short suggestive story of Hillary and Web Hubbell being a package deal at some point years ago. And Chelsea came from that relationship....so the story suggests.
Well....it's all fine and dandy, until you start thinking and realize that this story has been out in the American public view since the early 1990s.....over twenty years ago. As far as I know.....Germans were never told this nifty story (either in the 1990s or the last decade). Some Germans are waking up this morning....picking up on FOCUS, and gasping a bit. My goodness......probably is the first thing they state and they wonder if Americans will be told the truth on this.
Yeah.....an introduction of a smear story, which goes back twenty years, which might be true.....but it's the first time ever that most Germans have heard this. Unless the national press of Germany prints something.....it's simply not regarded as true. That's the blunt truth about German society and culture.
A planted story? By who? I'm guessing some comments by Hillary in the last week finally peeved some folks, and they decided to lay out a good smear story to some German reporters, and they simply worked up a simple twenty-line story and put it out there. By this weekend.....probably five million Germans will have read it and now start to gossip over the story and the lurid details of Hillary's past life. The fact that it's been around for twenty years in the US.....really doesn't dawn on these folks, and how it got dragged back up for a major telling once again.
Planting is an interesting episode. You need a cooperative press, a friendly reporter who is a bit naive and desperate for a four-star story.....and a willing society who will not read through the story and ask stupid questions.
This all goes back to one of my ten big negatives about news today....sometimes....news really isn't news, and we seem to overlook that.
