Why I Don't Trust Corporate Media

One example:

In 1999, celebrity film critic Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune died of a brain tumor. In 2003, Tim Weigel, well-known Chicago sports newscaster, died of a brain tumor.

Siskel and Weigel were college freshman roommates. At Yale.

When Weigel died, my first thought was, "Was there something in the water at Yale?" Something in their room? Floor?

Had they both weighed 300 pounds and died of heart attacks, I would have thought it was just coincidental that they died of similar causes at near the same age.

But, while brain tumors aren't uncommon, they aren't a leading cause of death either. I assumed that several Chicago tv and newspaper reporters would make their way to New Haven, to see if there were high incidences of brain tumors among their classmates and, especially, dorm mates. How difficult could searching alumni records be?

In another words, my first thought was not "It must be a coincidence," it was rather, "It could be a coincidence, but let's make sure. Maybe there was/is an environmental hazard at Yale."

Had Siskel's freshman roommate not been a celebrity himself and died of the same thing, it would have gone unreported and no one would have known. But since both were two of the most famous people in Chicago, I thought there would be some investigations to see if there was a common link.

But, it was not a big deal to me. As I'm not an avid watcher of local news or of the Chicago newspapers - all corportate media - I never came across the story, even if the "story" was that the deaths and the Yale connection were researched, and it all turned out to be a coincidence.

But the thought came back to me recently for some reason. I wondered, "What ever came of that?" So I did Google searches with various words like Yale, Siskel, Wiegel, brain. Yes, there are a small number of links, but no investigation into their deaths that I could see. (If you want to try it yourself, and find something substantive I missed, please let me know.)

I find that odd. No one in the Chicago media thought there was a story here, even just a story that affirms that there is no story? If I'm an editor or news director, I would have jumped on the story.

Now, it may have been coincidental. I will go so far as to say that it probably was. And maybe there was a report by somebody sometime which proved "coincidence" that never made it to the web, not even in a blog post. But am I the only longtime Chicago resident that was at all curious? You'd think that the definitive investigation into the matter would have led off any Google search of "Gene Siskel" and "Tim Weigel." Instead, I can't find anything at all.

Or, there was never an investigation by a Chicago media outlet: The thinking being, it was just coincidence and we are so convinced that it was a coincidence that we will not investigate.

If that is their attitude, then corporate media is, at best, lazy and untrustworthy. They will accept, for instance, anything the government tells them, just as they did in the run-up to the War on Iraq.

And that's the most charitable and least paranoid explanation. Where Yale is concerned, paranoia runs deep.