Whatever Happened to the News?

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

"When you mix fiction and news, you diminish the distinction between truth and fiction, and you wear down the audience's own discriminating power to judge."
–Bill Moyers

(snip)

But the regulatory pressure is gone now, and the temptation for local stations to drop the network news is increased by the fact that technology has made it possible for local stations to cover many of the national and international events the networks have covered, albeit usually in a sporadic and superficial way. Technology can transfer pictures from Panama or Eastern Europe quickly and cheaply, while understanding of their context is harder to come by.

Even now the amount of time American television devotes to the affairs of public life is tiny. Most industrialized countries, for instance, have at least a full half-hour of national news in prime time; the United States has 22-23 minutes (the length of an evening news broadcast when commercials are eliminated) in "early fringe" time, with even the slots at 6 or 6:30 p.m. increasingly going to game shows and tabloids.

Some form of serious television journalism will surely survive. But it could well be reduced to serving a specialized audience, while most of the public watches nothing but the softest form of "infotainment." With most of the public getting its news from television already and newspaper readership declining, the danger of creating a public that knows and cares little about public life is very real.

https://www.medialit.org/reading-room/whatever-happened-news

[global1]

1. They Have Their Talking Heads Tell Us How To Interpret Any News.....

We don't get it delivered pure and unvarnished. It always has some sort of slant on it that the people they have to discuss - interpret and spit back what we should think.

[lapucelle]

2. People mistake partisan websites like Democracy Now for the actual news. N/T

[Uncle Joe]

3. Perhaps that's because the corporate media is partisan,

they represent the best interests of their major corporate commercial buying patrons and the less than 1%.

That's their political party.

On the other hand, Democracy Now makes no bones about it, their coverage is from the ground up where the vast majority of the people live, it's not saturated by commercials and they're not afraid to speak truth to power.

[lapucelle]

4. Lots of people believe that the real news is "fake news". I'm not one of them. N/T

[Uncle Joe]

5. That's good, I don't believe the real news is fake news either. n/t