Glenn Beck was Right!
When you do your own research, you can usually find the truth!
Glenn Beck on his weekly FOX News program, the Glenn Beck Show, has repeatly admonished his audience telling them, Don't trust what anyone says, not even me. Do your own research!
Today a friend, a retired Lt. Col. in the U.S. Air Force, sent me a story by e-mail about a Chinese tour bus driver who lost his life because he ignored basic safety protocol when driving his bus within a Chinese sanctuary for Siberian Tigers. The Lt. Col. is one who had served his country in Vietnam as a commander leading the removal of unexploded ordianace, accomplishing his work unlike the cowboy portrayed in the faux movie, The Hurt Locker. The Hurt Locker had won the Best Picture at the 82nd Academy Awards, I assume for telling the best progressive lie catured on film for that year.
So I trusted his interest in this news story from overseas.
The Lt.Col.'s e-mail content reminded his readers that the bus driver's day was not unlike those for others who are in the business of being around danger, in this case a bad day for a careless Chinese bus driver while probably a good one from an aggresive Siberian Tiger's perspective.
That made me think about the tour bus driver, knowing if he had died a similar death in the United States the story would have given some information on his age, personal background, and if any family had been left behind so you could feel his loss.
However, I would soon discover that almost all the mainstream media around the world had treated the Chinese bus driver's death not unlike our own progressive media often treats our American treasures who give their lives overseas, in the end our vile media referring to them in print or video script as only nameless "soldiers," as if a few M&Ms were missing from a bag.
I am sensitive to this because a local newspaper had done the same to a war-time hero a few years back, one who had served from North Carolina. A progressive journalist from a Gannett-owned newspaper at the time was pushing a liberal agenda while not giving a damn who the soldier was a young terrorist had killed in Iraq, or where the soldier had come from or the family he had left behind.
And so this news story about a killed Chinese bus driver caught my attention, his doing his duty maybe to protect the passengers on his bus not unlike our soldiers who are protecting others back home from attack. I wanted to know more about this faceless man.
So following Glenn Beck's suggestion that we do our own research and not trust the media's information, I thought why not for this simple story. It would at least be good practice.
As I started to search the Internet for answers, I first wondered if anyone in the world's media checked into who the bus driver was or if he left any family behind. While the search engine showed 26,000 articles on the Internet related to the story, after awhile I finally had to give up trying to find out who the Chinese driver was beyond his name, which some news sources didn't even provide.
But the time spent on this small, self-assigned research turned out to become an excellent journey into WHAT media outlets had taken the time to give more information and what media outlets had simply parroted what AP or other agencies reported in their original mass release.
So below is a summary of my findings that might interest you, showing which news agencies simply tossed the story out to fill space and which ones took more time to inform their readers with additional details, one news source actually going over the top to dramatically show the environment the driver was killed in. That one had followed the old sage's advise saying a picture was worth a thousand words.
I thought I might first go a foreign news source to get a more complete story, but that didn't help. A foreign source, China News, simply pointed me back to a story on CBS News in New York City.
Then there was the original useless AP article, written as if coming from a box of bland oatmeal using week-old skim milk with no sugars sprinkled on top. The same was true from the useless national propaganda mouthpiece, NPR, along with Google News, these news sources seeming to parrot the Chinese news source, Xinhuanet. And ABC was also useless along with NBC, Canada's CTV fairing no better.
Another overseas' news source, the Belfast Telegraph, gave a similar story while including a photo of a tiger.
Gadling, a world traveler's blog, seemed to provide a more personal story while showing a picture of two tigers, asking why the hell the driver got out of the safety of the bus in the first place, wondering if he had ever been told that two tigers had killed a zoo worker in 2009. This became a very important new revelation for me that added to the mystery of the story.
You should know that it didn't seem to matter right or left on the reporting, the conservative Daily Caller giving a similar report as was shown in CBS News, with CBS taking space to show a picture of a tiger protecting its catch that gave its reader a feeling of the tiger's natural wild nature. FOX News and Yahoo News were also as bland as AP, which was also true of Salon.com, (URL not shown), while Breitbart seemed to want to give slightly more information.
One of the better stories came from the China-reporting division of the Telegraph, also giving the name of the Chinese driver with an amazing picture of probably the last thing the driver saw in his life. The Telegraph also reported that the zoo has been under investigation for using "cat parts" while not mentioning for what purpose. This content added more color to the story that the tiger sanctuary might not be so innocent as one would think.
BUT the WINNER for providing the best information to understand the bottom line of what happened in the Chinese bus driver was the New York Daily News, doing it better than ALL the others.
Why? the New York Daily News ACTUALLY showed a photo of a similar tour bus with bars around its windows and a tiger literally sitting on top of the bus as if waiting for his lunch to come out. It's obvious the tour bus company probably used this photo in driver training.
But in the end after all this research it can be determined that the Chinese bus driver was the one responsible for the loss of his own life, since the passengers obviously were not in any danger only inconvenienced by the bus being stuck in snow.
And as the late Paul Harvey would have said, And that's the Rest of the Story.
So Glenn Beck was right. Do your own research and believe no one, and you shall find the truth! A great lesson learned from a simple story.