Hi,
This week, thousands of people got jobs, made up with their wives,
found husbands that really loved them, and had diseases they knew were
fatal get cured at the hands of competent and professional doctors. A
few more thousand had something to eat, or found the money to pay
their bills from an unlikely source. A few miracles happened to people
who didn't even belive a God was listening. Did you hear any of this
on the news? Didn't you see it? No? Of course not. This news doesn't
sell, and it never has.
Since it's conception, story tellers have found there are certain
aspects to life which sell. Sensation, tragedy and wrongful death are
in the top ten. If we can find a person that has complete trust from
the public, and show that she has lied, this normally makes for a good
story too. The news is not to educate but to entertain. That is its
primary focus and it's buying power. It is very telling when a
newspaper such as the National Enquirer or the World News has the
largest subscription base in the world.
Do we really want to know? as the National Enquirer suggests in a
rather successful ad campaign. No, we don't really want to know
anything. We want something we can talk about, something that is
interesting, and therefore allows us feel interesting when we talk
about the story later. We don't want all the facts, we only want part
of them, so that we may speculate with others. It is not the media's
fault that the news in manufactured, it is our own. We, as a public,
don't really want anything else than what they give us. If we did,
then we would see a different film tonight at 11.
Patricia Smith, a columnist at The Boston Globe, "fabricated people
and quotations in four of her columns this year, and the newspaper has
asked for her resignation, The Globe announced yesterday" (Robin
Pogrebin, The New York Times, June 19, 1998).
"(I)n Ms. Smith's final column, published in today's issue of the
Globe, which is owned by the New York Times Company, she acknowledged
her misdeed" (Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, June 19, 1998).
"'In Boston, my face was my column. I wanted the pieces to jolt, to be
talked about, to leave the reader indelibly impressed. And sometimes,
as a result of trying to do too much at once and cutting corners, they
didn't. So I tweaked them to make sure they did. It didn't happen
often, but it did happen. And if it had only happened once, that was
one time too many'" (Patricia Smith, The Boston Globe, June 19, 1998).
"I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous
fiction."
Aneurin Bevan
"We live under a government of men and morning newspapers."
Wendell Phillips
"All the news that's fit to print."
Adoph Simon Ochs (motto of the New York Times from 1896)
"Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a
newspaper."
Thomas Jefferson
"I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand."
Tom Stoppard
News Values, Agenda Setting and Manufacturing the News
http://scholar.uws.edu.au/~99106560/new.htm
Signs of the Times - Rating the Credibility of the Media
http://www.loper.org/~george/trends/1998/Oct/38.html
Coventry University: Communication, Culture and Media Research
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ccmr/confer2/archive1/Hoe.htm
Television Coverage Of The Vietnam War And Its Implications For Future
Conflicts
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1984/HCD.htm
``All the President's Men,'' by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein;
``Dispatches,'' by Michael Herr;
``Journalism Today,'' by David Shaw;
``The Kingdom and the Power,'' by Gay Talese;
``Manufacturing the News,'' by Mark Fishman;
``The News Business,'' by Walter Mears and John Chancellor;
``The Powers That Be,'' by David Halberstam;
``Three Blind Mice,'' by Ken Auletta;
``Untended Gates: The Mismanaged Press,'' by Norman Isaacs;
``Uncovering the Sixties, The Life and Times of the Underground
Press,'' by Abe Peck.
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