Thursday, January 17, 2008

The Inflammatory Way of the Media

I get frustrated with the media for their inflammatory way of presenting things so that it scares the pants off of less critical thinking people, for their targeting the senior citizens eating their tomato soup and tuna sandwiches while watching the news at noon.

The other day my own dear Mother Smith got mad at me because of a horror story from the news. "They said on the news today that the government is letting our social security numbers out. They [note: whoever the heck "they" is] found Colin Powell's social security number! It's rampant!"

Now, understand the insinuation by mainstream media in this particular case is that the dastardly Dubya and his minions are the root of all evil and are letting your SS numbers "out there". (See http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/02/government_websites_yield_personal_data/ for a sample.)

The reality is that local county governments have taken property records online and are still not completely error proof in redacting social security numbers from days gone by when ID theft wasn't rampant...and, it's a bad thing...I don't disagree with that. In fact, I feel that property records should not be online...only the index of the records. I feel that anyone who looks at property records should be required to be registered with the county by proper ID so that abstractors can go about their abstracting business book by book...not so that anyone can peruse the records on a whim.

However, the way it is presented all Mother Smith hears is "The world is going to hell in a handbasket and I better go to the bank and get all my money and bury it in the back yard."

Mother Smith was gravely disappointed when I explained how the numbers came to be online.

Somehow I think my mother must have enjoyed ghost tales when she was a child...there's just something kind of exciting about being scared out of your wits.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Great article. Lots of good statistical information found right there. Interesting to see how much
all those big blogs are making.


public records