No Stranger to Conspiracy
By DAN BARRY, NYT
AS a veteran newspaper reporter, I’ve heard some things. I once sat in a Friendly’s restaurant in Connecticut with an earnest nun who, between sips of her Fribble, confided that an evil man who looked like Pope Paul VI — but who was not Pope Paul VI — had seized control of the Vatican in the 1960s. A papal double, she explained. And she had photographs to prove it.
I knocked back a double Fribble and asked for the check.
Journalists will entertain conspiracy theories because conspiracies, in fact, do take place, and at our best we seek out the stories behind the stories. But we also pay a price if we don’t buy into every one. If you write that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in the summer of 1969, some reader somewhere is guaranteed to call you a government dupe. Hey, Jimmy Olsen! Everyone knows that Armstrong took one giant leap on a secured movie lot. Sap.
Though I am not unfamiliar with being called a patsy, I still respect and admire those who challenge the conventional wisdom; this is how I was raised, as you will see. Even so, I was still cold-cocked by the response to a recent This Land column of mine that touched on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Holy Zapruder.
(More here.)
AS a veteran newspaper reporter, I’ve heard some things. I once sat in a Friendly’s restaurant in Connecticut with an earnest nun who, between sips of her Fribble, confided that an evil man who looked like Pope Paul VI — but who was not Pope Paul VI — had seized control of the Vatican in the 1960s. A papal double, she explained. And she had photographs to prove it.
I knocked back a double Fribble and asked for the check.
Journalists will entertain conspiracy theories because conspiracies, in fact, do take place, and at our best we seek out the stories behind the stories. But we also pay a price if we don’t buy into every one. If you write that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in the summer of 1969, some reader somewhere is guaranteed to call you a government dupe. Hey, Jimmy Olsen! Everyone knows that Armstrong took one giant leap on a secured movie lot. Sap.
Though I am not unfamiliar with being called a patsy, I still respect and admire those who challenge the conventional wisdom; this is how I was raised, as you will see. Even so, I was still cold-cocked by the response to a recent This Land column of mine that touched on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Holy Zapruder.
(More here.)
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