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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Friday, October 28, 2016

Henny Penny Media Award: Myths, Facts and Hyperbole

By Rich Kozlovich

I've decided to start awarding members of the media the Henny Penny Media Award for their promotion of myths, their failure in accuracy, and their unending love of hyperbole. For those who don't know who Henny Penny is let me give you some background. 

"Henny Penny, more commonly known in the United States as Chicken Little",........"is a folk tale with a moral" lesson.  A chicken is hit on the head by an acorn convincing the chicken the sky is falling.  A classic logical fallacy known as correlation is causation.  At any rate the chicken runs around screaming, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling, (the main stream media didn't exist when this folk tale was created or I'm sure in modern times it would have been a newscaster or a Hollywood celebrity) and this chicken tells everyone she meets of their doom, because she's sure the "sky is falling, and they (mostly other hysterical chickens) panic and run to the king for him to fix it.   But on the way they're met by a fox who convinces them to hide in his lair, and then eats them. 

The sky is falling scenario has become common idiom for hysterical or mistaken beliefs of eminent disaster, and the media feeds on it like leeches feeding on the blood of their hosts.  They and the green movement represent Chicken Little, which makes this award is so appropriate.  The Fox represents a segment of the green movement - and others who've jumped on to this bandwagon - that's fleecing the public with their scares creating legislation and regulations unnecessarily costing untold billions.  In short "eating" the pubic financially.  The hysterical public running to the king for a solution certainly represents what's been going on for about 75 years by the green movement, the federal bureaucracy, Congress and the President of the United States.

I'm interested in nominations for this award, along with the background story.  Please post them in the Comments section. 

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