I'm waiting to find out what good journalism is.
You certainly won't find an example of good journalism at the above link, as Moot ironically notes. The most "covered up" or "underreported" stories are either conspiracy theories in nature, or simply not newsworthy in the first place.
As for conspiracy theories, which have become ubiquitous thanks to the panic-power of the Internet and the tendency for people to believe the unbelievable, all you have to do is understand what a conspiracy is, the different types, how they are conceived and how they work, and then apply that to human nature, and you will often simply be embarrassed to be the believer of a conspiracy theory.
In 1936, American commentator H.L. Mencken wrote:
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy.
The types of conspiracy theories are pretty straightforward:
Event conspiracy theories. The conspiracy is held to be responsible for a limited, discrete event or set of events. The conspiratorial forces are alleged to have focused their energies on a limited, well-defined objective. The best-known example in the recent past is the Kennedy assassination conspiracy literature.
Systemic conspiracy theories. The conspiracy is believed to have broad goals, usually conceived as securing control of a country, a region, or even the entire world. While the goals are sweeping, the conspiratorial machinery is generally simple: a single, evil organization implements a plan to infiltrate and subvert existing institutions. This is a common scenario in conspiracy theories that focus on the alleged machinations of Jews, Freemason, Catholic Church.
Superconspiracy theories. Conspiratorial constructs in which multiple conspiracies are believed to be linked together hierarchically. Event and systemic are joined in complex ways, so that conspiracies come to be nested together. At the summit of the conspiratorial hierarchy is a distant but all-powerful evil force manipulating lesser conspiratorial actors. Thanks to the Internet, Superconspiracy theories have enjoyed particular growth.
We also know these things to be true about conspiracy theories:
- People who believe in one theory are more likely to believe in others
- There is a strong association between income, education and belief levels: the better-off and better educated are less likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
- Instability makes most of us uncomfortable; people prefer to imagine living in a predictable, safe world. Some conspiracy theories offer accounts that feel “safe” or “predictable,” even if the outcome or cause is scary. The 911 conspiracy is like that.
- Conspiracy theories often mutate over time in light of new or contradicting evidence.
- Conspiracies usually require a big newsworthy event on which to peg it.
For a conspiracy theory to get started, there has to be something that a conspiracy theorist can use, something that doesn't make sense. Sometimes it's glaring, but usually it's some little thing, but in all cases it does have to be a legitimate discrepancy, something that doesn't make sense normally. From the point of the discrepancy, the theorist has to explain
everything that happened in a believable way. If the theorist cannot do that, then the theory is not going to hold up and no one will believe it. So he has to do a lot of work gathering evidence and looking for alternative explanations. The 911 and Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories are excellent examples of this. The phantom missile fired off the California coast is not, since people who believe that are just ignorant of airplane contrails and the optical illusions of perspective.
One interesting thing about conspiracy theories is, the more irrefutable evidence which surfaces to disprove the conspiracy, the more many people will entrench their belief in the theory, and will expand the conspiracy theory to discount or explain away real, actual, irrefutable evidence, sometimes in the most far-reaching ways imaginable. Even if the theory is based firmly on a lie, and is proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to be a lie, many people will still cling to the lie and prefer the lie over the truth.
With government conspiracies, as G. Gordon Liddy once succinctly put it,
"The problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans."
So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is to be true.
