There was a post on reddit recently where somebody had taped a segment from The Weather Channel that portrayed a reporter “leaning into the wind” as he reported on the ruthless weather created by hurricane Florence. The reporter’s words conveyed the miles per hour of the gusts, and that there were already two deaths during this hurricane, so viewers should take care to stay alive.

There were actually many odd parts of the broadcast segment though that made the segment especially noteworthy. First, there were two individuals walking in the background behind the reporter who clearly weren’t having any trouble casually walking along the street while checking their smart phones. Also, you could see grass and bushes blowing in what wind there was and the reporter was leaning in the same direction as the wind, and if any vicious gust had occurred he would have been pushed over onto his face. The reporter clearly has never actually leaned into a wind so could not even pretend in a realistic way to coincide with his literal surroundings. The most glaring point of the broadcast was that it was on The Weather Channel, the one channel you might believe has a legitimate interest in factually reporting on the weather.

In the comments, a reddit user had posted an old video from the NBC Today Show, where the reporter was in a canoe and was reporting on a flood. Except you could tell her paddle was actually hitting the ground as she tried to “paddle”. And then two people walked in front of the camera, easily traversing the ankle-deep flood.

There was one more video that I watched that I want to mention that was from 1960 and is called “Frames of Reference,” which gives an interesting take on “how frames of reference shape perspective.” It is less than 30 minutes long and is well worth watching, but I have embedded a short snippet below. This snippet shows that the object they are sliding across the table is still traveling in a straight line and that we only perceive it as traveling a curved path when our point of view is from the camera that is on the platform that is spinning.

When I went from a reporter, to an editor, and then to Editor-in-Chief/Publisher at a small weekly paper as a youth, it slowly dawned on me that the primary function of the articles was to fill the space around the advertisements. As a reporter, and even as an editor, I had felt that the purpose of the newspaper was to publish factual articles to inform or entertain the readers. And from one perspective, that was true. But from another perspective, I realized the articles were almost meaningless and we could probably just run funny pictures, or puzzles or word jumbles, it really didn’t make any difference to our activity of selling ads.

Yes, newspapers and TV stations also want to shape the beliefs and opinions of their audience, but the primary purpose of the various media is usually to fill in the space between the ads. From the publisher's point-of-view it doesn’t matter if the content is completely made up, the content will still be following the straight-line goal of filling in space around the advertisements. But depending on your frame of reference the content may look skewed and curved.

This article, and the above snippet, probably aren't revealing anything new to most adults in this day and age, but I thought the old physics lecture, juxtaposed with the modern media spin and fabrications, was a novel way to see the whole picture.

If you are in the spinning world everything looks curved and non-sensical, and it isn’t until you step off the spin-cycle that you see that it is indeed following a straight path, but that the straight path may not have been as you had assumed, such as to inform or present facts, but perhaps to just fill in space and time until you arrive at the next advertisement, or perhaps to skew our perspectives, or whatever.

But adding all of this information together leads one to believe that perhaps it isn’t the news we should be examining, but ourselves and our perspective, or the newscaster's frame of reference, or even our neighbors' perspectives. At minimum, at least these frequent faux pas on the part of the news media are letting viewers learn that all is not as it is presented, and that much depends on one's frame of reference.

X-posted at Medium